If the spirit of the fediverse is to spread everything across small instances, then i think it would be really important to make communities, especially niche communities, easier to discover across instances. Since it is not planned to crawl federated instances community catalog, i think instance admins, or maybe even the lemmy software itself, should point more obvious to services like https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search for communities instead of the lemmy (or mbin, piefed) internal search. It’s been a while since i have seen someone talk about these community crawler services.
Instances that don’t federate a remote community won’t even list this community in the user profile of a moderator.
Yeah, disabled accounts means the instance doesn’t have a bot from the site on their instance so the site can’t federate them. Usually this would be not accepting the user application
Lemmy.world isnt in the site but most other large instances are
It’s not even 50 instances on there though, and almost half of them seem to be disabled. Not just .world, also .ml, slrpnk, feddit.de - that is a huge chunk of the lemmyverse. I don’t know if that is the solution, certainly not as it is now.
Even with the disabled instances, communities that get added onto there reach a much larger section of people than external community browsers do as casual users that just check the site once a day or something and don’t pay attention to external sites can still stumble on them without knowing the federate site exists or needing to know explicit community names
Ideally more instances would get added onto there but its still fine like this. Been getting some nice interactions and starting activity on new programming.dev communities
Yeah, it is certainly better than nothing, that is absolutely fair, and probably makes a lot of sense to use for people who can.
Sadly i can’t, because “my” community is on .world. I used a similar “relay” type thing some time ago, but not sure how well it worked.
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Yeah, i also don’t think it’s pointless.
Those instances opting out (if they did) probably has a good reason.
I just think it would be good to point users to some kind of crawler that knows all the communities. Searching communities under “all” from within lemmy is almost misleading. I feel like it mainly also affects smaller instances and communities.
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I just saw that at least lemmy.world and lemm.ee actually do actually point users to a crawler from their “Getting started / Lemmy guide” which is cool, but also quite easy to miss. Anyway, good job .world and lemm.ee!