Finding communities to join can be hard because each fediverse server only knows about a community after someone has joined it before. It’s a chicken and egg problem. To solve this, PieFed comes with eggs included!
Techy details: a local copy of https://data.lemmyverse.net/data/community.full.json is regularly updated, inactive and nsfw communities removed and then the resulting shortlist is used to suggest search results to people when adding a remote community.
Check out the video for a quick demo.
Massive props to @[email protected] for their work on this feature!
It provides a better user experience by far though.
When you’re the first on your instance to subscribe to a foreign lemmy community, your instance only gets 10 posts and no comments or vote info. So you get a nearly useless empty sub that will start filling in from that point as people post new things. Especially frustrating if you were looking for or were linked to a specific thread.
With this solution your content was already there, waiting for you. And also searches on your instance will return posts and comments from that community greatly increasing discoverability.
PieFed also has an equivalent of lemmy-federate for mass subscribing, built into the admin area.
Nice!
Fair enough. I guess it’s up to individual admins to assess whether the pros outweigh the cons for that bot.