Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn’t be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few hundred instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn’t be onerous for a one-time download.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Doing it in a federated way.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn’t be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few hundred instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn’t be onerous for a one-time download.