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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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I think for official communities self-hosted instances feels like a win-win for everyone. Companies get full control of their community but no one has to participate with it in isolation. They can also separate discussions, eg news@pokemon.com or blueprints@factorio.com.
For more abstract themed communities lime technology it's definitely more complex. Reddit's partial solution is multi-subreddits which could apply here but it's far from a complete solution.
The issue with that is that an user could be on a popular instance, like lemmy.world or a related one like lemdroid, and search for a community on it. They could find a ghost community that was created unofficially before the self-hosted one. In that case they could think this is it and there's no real discussion to be had on Lemmy.
It is also slightly weird because there's an incentive for developers to grab the appname@popular.instance to ensure they can use the name and link it to the official instance. But that also leaves a ton of pretty much barren communities.
That's why I think keeping in sync would be a good feature, keep all communities in sync with the official one so that users aren't lost.
That said, this only works for official communities, and maybe(huge maybe) regional communities that have a self hosted instance
The practical solution for that, is to simply search the topic you are interested in plus lemmy on google. Chances are best that you will find the most active community.
Since reddit's search feature was completely unusable for the majority of its history, for me that is just "business as usual". Though it would be nice to have a more integrated solution.
Alright but what if there was an active community that moved to a self hosted one? Wouldn't that still show the older community first?
The search function typically lists the biggest communities first, so the likelihood that a user will encounter a barren community first, is probably not that high.
Doesn't it place higher the communities that are on the same instance as the user?
Theoretically it shows the communities with the highest subscriber count first.
Right now tho it seems, that Lemmy is bad at fetching the real subscriber counts of other instances. For example I get this result, when searching for Linux on this account right now.
Every sub-count besides the one of my home-instance is terribly outdated, thus it favors the home-instance community. This is probably not the intent of the developers tho.
I'm currently using Connect (the android App) and search is even funkier, to the point where it order is frankly random, and it appears to only show "famous" instances or the ones I'm subscribed to at least a community.
I know this isn't intended, but I can't help but feel that if sync was possible, this wouldn't be a noticible issue