I’m running on a personal lemmy instance, and I’ve been able to simply re-subscribe to the communities that I was subscribed to on my previous lemmy.ml account.

But what if I didn’t have that? How would I discover those communities?

On the micro blogging fediverse, I can use relays, follow other peoples boosts, or join gup.pe groups etc for content discovery and to give me federated content in general on which to do content discovery.

What does that look like in the lemmyverse niche of the fediverse? How does a small single person instance find new content? How do they get richer content search options etc? Right now, I’m just using search on lemmy.ml for that, but that’s a work around, not a solution

  • DessalinesA
    11·
    2 years ago

    This is a really good question.

    For micro-blogging, the only one of those that’s internal to your service, is “boosts”. The equivalent for lemmy, would be cross-posts on communities you already follow, where the url field is either your local copy, or the federated link. Someone would x-post a link from another community, you’d see it, then subscribe to it.

    A better answer to your question tho, would be a global community discovery service. Someone could either write one, and @nutomic@lemmy.ml has also written a lemmy-instance-crawler for join-lemmy.org to do the same. We could also potentially expand what join-lemmy.org shows, to list the most popular communities globally, and for each instance.

    Since communities aren’t tagged, the only real way to look through them would be by popularity tho. But it would at least be a centralized place to see every known community on every known instance.

    • nutomicMA
      8·
      2 years ago

      The cross-posts for a given post are not federated. This means you will only see cross-posts in cases where you or someone else on your instance already follows the communities where it was posted. So they dont help for discovering content on a new instance.

      • JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social
        6·
        2 years ago

        Any reason for this other than “didn’t think about it”? It seems like a great way to help newer/smaller instances discover content that is on unknown instances.

        • nutomicMA
          5·
          2 years ago

          Crossposts are only implemented in the frontend (using search afaik). The backend doesnt know anything about this concept and so cant federate it.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      7·
      2 years ago

      I’ve love to see a third party search that shows communities by name, instance and subscriber count!

      It doesn’t have to be a full text search of the contents, just a searchable listing of communities!. Combine that with the ability to configure my own instance in settings on the search site. It would let me click on a link in the search results and be redirected back to my own instance, ready for a single click subscribe to the remote instance!

    • Thann
      6·
      2 years ago

      Lemmy is way better than Mastodon for content discovery, which is one of the biggest reasons I wish that lemmy supported “self-posts”, i.e. posting to your own timeline.

      being able to cross-post “mastodon-like content” directly on lemmy would really help content discovery, make attributions simpler, and make lemmy the undisputed champion of the fediverse!

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
        4·
        2 years ago

        I went from thinking “Why on earth would you want self posts?” to “Wow, how does lemmy not already have self posts, they would be a killer feature” as I read your post :)