Been playing with a new design for the search screen. This change was prompted by a user who wanted a faster way to access subscribed communities. This design also suggests some communities to users which could be cool.
For suggestions, I have a few options. I think the best way to implement it would be to create a server that generates community suggestions however this would incur a monthly cost. I think if I go this route I will create the start of a backend for Summit and open source it. The ideal situation is to get the monthly server cost covered by donations but I can also cover the cost. It should be around ~10-15 CAD/mo.
If any one has any suggestions/concerns feel free to comment.
That's an interesting idea. Maybe also include a current list of trending communities, similar to the daily post in !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl?
Since you are looking at revising the search screen, I would also be interested in some sort and filter options for searching communities:
Sort the results by number of posts, or monthly average users, or by community with the most recent post.
Exclude communities from dead or defederated instances. For example, when lemmyf.uk shuts down every instance they were federated with will retain local copies of their old communities. There is no reason to refer users to those ghost town communities.
That's actually where I got the idea of a list of suggested communities from. The suggestions will be based on what is trending.
Unfortunately both of these ideas would be difficult to implement on the client side without some sort of server side support. These features are better suited for the Lemmy server than a client :(. The client already allows you to sort the results however the way they are sorted isn't always intuitive.