If the spirit of the fediverse is to spread everything across small instances, then i think it would be really important to make communities, especially niche communities, easier to discover across instances. Since it is not planned to crawl federated instances community catalog, i think instance admins, or maybe even the lemmy software itself, should point more obvious to services like https://lemmyverse.net/communities to search for communities instead of the lemmy (or mbin, piefed) internal search. It’s been a while since i have seen someone talk about these community crawler services.
Instances that don’t federate a remote community won’t even list this community in the user profile of a moderator.
Yeah, it is certainly better than nothing, that is absolutely fair, and probably makes a lot of sense to use for people who can.
Sadly i can’t, because “my” community is on .world. I used a similar “relay” type thing some time ago, but not sure how well it worked.
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Yeah, i also don’t think it’s pointless.
Those instances opting out (if they did) probably has a good reason.
I just think it would be good to point users to some kind of crawler that knows all the communities. Searching communities under “all” from within lemmy is almost misleading. I feel like it mainly also affects smaller instances and communities.
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I just saw that at least lemmy.world and lemm.ee actually do actually point users to a crawler from their “Getting started / Lemmy guide” which is cool, but also quite easy to miss. Anyway, good job .world and lemm.ee!