Question about how communities are discovered from other instances (self.lemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by lackthought to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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I have a lemmy account on lemmy.sdf.org

When searching for communities to join I can see several in the list from lemmy.ml and beehaw.org

but while searching for some communities that I know exist on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org I am getting no results

will a community from instance A only appear in search results on instance B if a user from instance B has already manually subscribed to that specific community from instance A?

basically, there is no scraping of 'all available' communities even when two instances know of each others existence? only 'specific communities' are indexed when a user has manually found/subscribed?

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[-] lackthought 1 points 1 year ago

how does your directory (or the search from feddit.de for that matter) find brand new communities?

suppose I create a community on sdf.org called 'HooverMaxExtractPressureProModel60' for discussion on a specific vacuum cleaner

how will any 3rd party scraper/search tool know of its existence so it can be indexed?

I was thinking each instance could keep of a list of all their own communities and share that list with other known instances in some way as a way to 'spread the word' on what is available

[-] kiwi@kale.social 2 points 1 year ago

I think that would be possible to do to help with searching for new communities. Although for now I’m not sure there’s too much difference between it existing on each instance vs on https://browse.feddit.de/. Other than ease of use of staying on one website I guess.

[-] lackthought 2 points 1 year ago

yeah for me its mainly laziness so I don't have to use an external site to search

but new users who may not be aware of external directories could have trouble finding niche communities if no one from their instance has subscribed yet

just a user experience thing I was thinking about

this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023

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