this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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What is the intended method of content discovery? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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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

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Thann@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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!

[–] poVoq 4 points 2 years ago

You might want to look into kbin then. It includes both.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] Thann@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

<3

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 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.zone 5 points 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!

[–] JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

On bigger instances (like lemmy.ml ) you can click the instances on the bottom, which shows you all the linked (and blocked) lemmy instances. From there you can put them in search and it's to my understanding they'll start showing up in 'all' post feed. Again another work around, but this is closer to what you want.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I was hoping that groups from instances that my instance knows about would show up in group search, but that doesn't seem to work either. They only show up in search if someone from my instance has subscribed to them.

I had someone from a science based instance reply to me somewhere, and so that instance now appears in the instances list for my lemmy instance, but the groups there don't show up from a plain old search. I have to go to that site, find the group, get the URL and then search for it on my site, which is a pain.

And of course, lemmy is still in development, so I can work with that, but I was wondering if there was a future vision as to how it might work?

[–] JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah you're right about groups/communities not showing up in search or the communities view. That's unfortunate that they don't all federate upon discovery of the instance. I kinda assumed discovery of the instance was discovery of all communities.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Federated communities do show up both on the search page, and the communities page.

https://lemmy.ml/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

[–] JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But looking from Ada's instance: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

You don't see all lemmy.ml communities. Unless this is a case of "federation takes some time" (might be, I'm not very familiar with the inner workings) it seems that the only communities known to lemmy.blahaj.zone are those that have been searched for.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep that's correct, instances don't automatically connect to all communities. Someone from that instance has to subscribe to it first, for that instance to start getting updates.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Right, but that's the very problem I'm trying to solve! On a tiny instance, most of the communities I'm interested in on other instances won't have anyone subscribed from my instance. It will be me being the first to subscribe. So I'm trying to find a way of finding them when no one else follows them yet :)

[–] nrsk@nrsk.no 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

NRSK uses an admin-run "Fetcher" account to subscribe to various extenal communities and pull interesting content to our home "All" timeline. It's a combination between browsing through communities on known and/or federated instances, and using join-lemmy.org to find new and unconnected instances. It's all manually, which is a bummer but better than basically only local content for fresh users.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years ago

That's an interesting idea! Not so relevant for my particular circumstances, but it's a good idea if we ever do start to get more users in!

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It would be pretty easy to write a bot which does this automatically. Problem is that you could easily end up with a lot of spam or other unwanted content.

[–] nrsk@nrsk.no 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Pulling all communities would definitively lead to unwanted content.

Since it's basically a work-around for the local only (incl. already pulled communities) search, more ideal solutions could be:

  • Search works for all federated instances
  • Universal search for all instances
  • Admins can add instances to search through admin settings
  • join-lemmy.org hosts a searchable community directory similar to join-lemmy.org/instances

Having some way to discover unfetched content (even if only from already federated instances) would be a significant addition to Lemmy!

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Are you talking pulling in posts from all of the groups on remote servers or just a list of groups? My thought was I just want group names to appear in my list when I search for them. I don't care so much if the content doesn't come through right away, as long as I can find the right group.

[–] nrsk@nrsk.no 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Just the overview, similar to local search. Titles, usernames, perhaps thumbnails and text excerpts of posts.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years ago

Honestly, my ideal solution would just be some sort of implementation that makes my lemmy instance aware of the groups on other lemmy instances that I federate with, so those groups turn up in searches. It will grow organically that way even without active seeding

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

How would you feel about bundling this type of automatic discovery into lemmy, as an optional server setting (default off)?

It'd be one of the periodic maintenance jobs we already have in there.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 years ago

I'd love to see it. All it needs to do is explore the list of groups available on the servers we federate with. It doesn't need to be universal search, it can grow organically.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Not so good, because this would require a lot of customization options to fetch communities according to different criteria. I think this makes much more sense as an external tool, then it can have a config file or be forked for different behaviour.

[–] wintermute@feddit.de 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What about a public API-endpoint listing an instance's communities, e.g. with the data already provided in the community sidebar?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

That already exists, there's a dedicated getcommunities endpoint… and a search that can search for communities.