Community Search Tips

The release of Lemmy 0.18.0 has brought many welcome improvements and bug-fixes. Searching for communities through the software has been improved, but it is still a bit tricky. This article will help you understand what you're seeing when you try to find a community using Lemmy 0.18.0.

By now you have probably created an account on a Lemmy instance somewhere (like lemmy.ninja, for instance!) and you're now ready to start subscribing to communities that interest you. So you head off to the Communities page and decide to search for a science fiction community.

New in 0.18.0, when you search from the search box in the Communities page, you will get search results that include comments, posts, communities, users, and URLs. You now need to filter your search results to communities.

When you do that, you may see something similar to the search results below. Only one result, with only two subscribers? What's going on?

First, you're only seeing the communities that have been previously searched for by other users of your Lemmy instance. There may be more science fiction communities out there, but if nobody has searched for the specific instance URL from your instance, you won't see them in these search results.

Additionally, you're seeing 2 subscribers in the image above because only two users from this instance are subscribed to that community. At the time of writing, Science Fiction@lemmy.world is estimated to have 2,000 subscribers from all Lemmy instances, but only 2 of those are from Lemmy.ninja, where that screenshot was taken.

If you don't see the community you're interested in, you will need to get its URL from another source, like lemmyverse.net or browse.feddit.de. You can use either the direct URL or a shorthand URL. (There is a third method which involves constructing a long-form URL, but I will skip that because it's the most complex method and doesn't seem to give any advantage over the others.)

For this example, we will add a new science fiction communiy. According to lemmyverse.net, there is a good candidate, also called Science Fiction, hosted over at Lemmy.ml.

If we visit that community, we will see that the direct URL (copied out of the URL bar of the browser after visiting the site) is https://lemmy.ml/c/sciencefiction. We can also see from the output from lemmyverse.net that the shorthand URL for this community is !sciencefiction@lemmy.ml. I will use the shorthand URL when searching for the community at lemmy.ninja's communities page.

When I do this, I will momentarily see "No results," because !sciencefiction@lemmy.ml hasn't been added to Lemmy.ninja before. But now we see one of the important bug-fixes of Lemmy version 0.18.0 at work: a few seconds later, Science Fiction@lemmy.ml appears in the search results! Now you can click on the link and subscribe to it from your instance, and all posts from that community will arrive in your subscribed feed.

There's one last thing I want to point out about searching for communities. If you look carefully at the images above, you will see that the name of the community is Science Fiction, but that the direct URL and the shorthand URL use sciencefiction (without a space). Once a community has been added to an instance, you could use either Science Fiction or the direct or shorthand URLs to find it. But if it hasn't been added to your instance before, you must use either the direct URL or the shorthand URL to find it.

Lemmy.ml has performed a server update that appears to have fixed the issue where subscriptions to communities on Lemmy.ml showed "subscribe pending" instead of "subscribed."

To fix your subscription, just unsubscribe from the community and subscribe again.

edit: As of 2023-06-23, the problem is back again. If you see "Subscribe Pending," just know that you can still participate in the community. It's just a display bug.

Last week, Beehaw.org announced that they are de-federating themselves from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. All three of those Lemmy instances are big, with dozens of very active, popular communities. So how does that impact you as a Lemmy user?

When Beehaw.org says they are "de-federating" with Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, what they mean is that they've blocked Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works from participating in communities on beehaw.org. That means that users who registered accounts at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't be able to participate on any communities at beehaw.

If you're a user who registered at a different Lemmy instance, such as our own Lemmy.ninja, you won't be affected. You will still be able to participate in communities from all three of those instances.

There's another impact, however. Sh.itjust.works and (especially) Lemmy.world are sites with a large number of users. By defederating, Beehaw has eliminated a large number of users from participating in their communities. That means that the communities at Beehaw will become less active, and competing communities on other instances may start to grow.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/171497

Sub.Rehab lists relocated Subreddits' new homes in the Fediverse or other platforms

[Ed. Note: if you see that a subreddit you want to follow is on kbin.social, don't fret. You can still subscribe to kbin "magazines" directly from lemmy.ninja. You will find details on how to do this in our New User FAQ.

Today we learned about Lemmy Explorer, a Lemmy instance and community search tool. It uses a crawler to collect information from Lemmy Fediverse servers, scanning each server once every 12 hours. With this tool you can sort your searches by more criteria than the community search at feddit.de:

• Subscriber Count
• Active User Count
• Post Count
• Comment Count

The default sorting method is called "Smart Sort," which we haven't been able to find documentation about yet.

A quick search for an Apple community yields strange results. !apple@lemmy.ml shows up first when sorted by posts, but !selfsovereignid@exploding-heads.com is the second search result, which merely mentions Apple Wallet in their sidebar and has nothing to do with Apple. Sixth on the list is !destiny@lemmy.world, which doesn't even mention Apple anywhere -- sidebar or otherwise.

Right now it looks like this is another way to see Lemmy servers and communities, but probably not the best method to compare them to each other and find the right community for you. For now let's call it another arrow in the quiver, but not the best search tool.

Our friends at feddit.de have created a live search tool for Lemmy communities! Type in your search term and the community browser will show you a list of communities sorted by total number of posts (descending). This will help ensure that you pick the most active variant of a particular community.

The search results will give you three major blocks of information.

1. The direct URL and a copy URL button. Use this URL in the community search box.
2. The name of the community. You can click this to read the community sidebar and see if the community is right for you.
3. Vital statistics (instance URL, post, comment, and subscriber counts).

So far it doesn't look like it will show you any kbin magazines (what kbin calls a community). Rest assured you can still search for and find kbin magazines the old fashioned way -- just not with browse.feddit.de.

Asif Youssuff assembled this short list of subreddits and corresponding kbin or Lemmy communities that have sprung up to replace them. It's organized into subscriber count buckets, making it easier to evaluate whether the replacement community is active enough for your subscription.

Lemmy is a federated news aggregator, which means that most of the posts and communities that have the most activity don't reside on this server. At Lemmy.ninja, we do a lot of work trying to find those remote communities and make them easy for you to find and subscribe to.

If you're looking for a community, head to our community list and click on "all." When we find a good, active remote community, we make sure to subscribe to it so that it appears there. This list will continually grow!

edit: Well, in the intervening days since this post, we've changed from an allow-list approach to a block-list approach when it comes to federating with other communities. Doing this had an unexpected impact on our community list -- it started auto-populating. That means that it's slowly filling with communities that we haven't curated. That's okay, though; as we grow, you can use the subscriber counts on the community list to get an idea of what is popular across all of the Lemmy and kbin communities!

If you're new to Lemmy, it can be hard to find communities to subscribe to. Unlike monolithic sites like Reddit, federated sites require you to discover the communities (and the sites they reside on) yourself.

Here at lemmy.ninja, we've found a lot of good communities that you can access from the communities section of this server. To find more, I decided to plumb one of the largest Lemmy sites, lemmy.ml, to see what its users are subscribed to. I took the top 2000 sites listed at lemmy.ml and sorted them according to the number of posts in the community. Check out the full list here.

Keep in mind that the list heavily favors communities on lemmy.ml, but it's a start!