feature request: instance communities

vkirlin@lemmy.world to Jerboa@lemmy.ml – 21 points –

It would be nice if it was possible to see all communities of specific instance within the app

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Are you sure you're talking about the same thing as the OP? The feature request (which I wholeheartedly support) is just listing the communities of a specific instance, something that's hopefully quite forward (since you'll just have to ask an instance which communities it knows, no central directory required).

The idiomatic way to query communities in Lemmy is to interrogate your instance, not to interrogate the instance hosting the community. I think there are some sensible reasons for this:

  • Large instances hosting lots of communities want to delegate read workload to the many instances out there hosting users. They don't WANT everyone coming to query the communities instance directly. That's rather the whole point of federation. Now, will one app doing direct community-hosting queries bring down the threadiverse? No, it won't. But it's not how community discovery is envisioned to work, and Jerboa being developed by the lemmy devs means that it's unlikely to employ non-federated community discovery hacks.
  • If you offer community discovery by directly querying the instance, you create another discovery problem which is equally hard to solve... which is instance discovery. OP may have a particular instance in mind already that they want to query, but as soon as querying communities by instance becomes a commonly used feature... people WILL immediately begin asking how to search instances to put into that list... which again is generally a problem that is supposed to be addressed through federation. Also if you don't build instance discovery, you'll have tons of reports from people who mistype instance names and can't figure out why it's not working.

All of which is to say that while there is an approach that involves directly querying a specific instance... it's a partial solution that doesn't build toward a comprehensive one. I don't expect the devs to move this direction, but rather to focus on fixing the community browser in lemmy and exposing those capabilities through jerboa. This is the larger job I was referring to, and although there is a shorter path to OP's specific request, I don't think it's a likely one to be followed in Jerboa.

Thank you for the well thought out reply! I understand now that its not the way Lemmy devs envision this particular part of the fediverse to develop. It doesn't completely agree with what I see in the current federation landscape though: Most communities cluster around shared interest, be they language, nsfw vs non-nsfw or ideology. Following that, there is a clustering effect regarding the communities on each instance: If I find an instance with a community I care about I'm pretty likely to be interested in the other communities on there too. My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads. But I get the "idiomatic" argument and understand why Jerboa devs are unlikely to want this feature.

All fair enough. I'm not real convinced about this though:

My guess is: A popular app will implement this feature and it will become mandatory for everyone else who wants downloads.

I suspect some app does do this already, some definitely have ways to interact with specific instances while logged out of them. I have 6 lemmy apps or PWAs installed just to keep up with new developments there... but I couldn't tell you the differences in community discovery between them because the federation and instance discovery problems make it unrelentingly terrible on all of them when compared to lemmyverse.net, which already supports browsing communities by instance.

While I would love for in-app discovery to be good, the journey from where we are to where lemmyverse.net is is long enough that I don't really see any intermediate hacks as being app-defining.