Making threadiverse communities more discoverable - some suggestions ( kbin.social )

Prouvaire OP , 11 months ago

2. ALLOW COMMUNITIES TO BE DISCOVERED MORE EASILY ON UNFEDERATED INSTANCES

Communities should automatically (unless the community owner deliberately prevents this) be registered with one or more community directory services. The lemmy/kbin community search facility should use these services by default so that a new user's search results are not limited to communities that have already been pulled into that user's instance.

Multiple directory services should be available for the search service (similar to how you can switch between DNS servers) in order to eliminate single point sensitivity, which is part of the fediverse ethos.

The current method of finding new communities not already federated ("enter the exact, direct address of the community, and/or search and wait for a day before any results show up for anything not already on this instance") should be deprecated and only be used in the event these community directory services are down.

This will prevent the following scenario: A new user chooses an instance, creates an account, and searches for a community related to their interest on that instance. They may find a popular community (eg /gaming), because other users on that instances have already joined it (or because someone has created this community on their instance). But even moderately obscure communities will likely not appear in the search results because they're hosted on another instance, and nobody on this instance has subscribed to them yet. This makes it look like the fediverse is a lot emptier than it actually is, because niche communities (the long tail of communities that are the secret sauce of reddit's success) are difficult to discover.

Basically, every community should easily be discoverable from any instance on first search (unless the community owner deliberately chooses to hide their community from the directory services).

I know there are already some websites that act as a directory of communities, but you have to be aware of these in order to use them. They are not built into the native community search functionality of lemmy or kbin, so 99% of users (especially new users) will not be aware of them.