I made a tool for discovering new communities on lemmy

stirante@sh.itjust.works to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 527 points –

Hey, I made a simple webapp, that shows you a random community with basic stats, description and top 10 posts of all time from this community.

You can use it without logging in, but for automatic following, the login is required.

All data is stored in your browser and code is open source.

Some info and issues of the app:

  1. I made it in a day, so bugs may and will happen

  2. It uses a json list of communities from browse.feddit.de

  3. It ignores all NSFW communities. I'm planning on adding a switch for that, but if you really want, you can change nsfwFilter property in local storage through devtools. all is for everything, none is for no NSFW and only is for only NSFW communities.

  4. Sometimes it fails to follow a community. Maybe it's because community is not yet "synced" to the instance you logged in from. Don't know much about exact reason, because I'm new to lemmy from the tech side.

  5. There is also a planned feature to exclude whole instances. Currently only possible with editing local storage.

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It's maybe an idea to filter out communities with less than 10 posts.

When I tried it, it gave me a community with 1 post and no comments (there's a lot of dead communities on lemmy, so you might need to do something to increase the chance of an interesting response)

Just pushed an update, that will hide all communities with less than 11 posts. I will make it configurable later.

To see changes, force refresh the site.

Am I missing something? Or is the link to this tool not actually present in the post? I only see a screenshot.

I cannot find the link for the life of me either...(browsing on the original webui)

The link is in the post after the first sentence

Where exactly? https://i.imgur.com/BRQ6AdB.png

Probably the edit somehow didn't work for you (I forgot to post the link initially, but added it after like 2 minutes).

The link is https://stirante.github.io/lemmy-discover/

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Actually, I can't find it either, which means that probably no one else in the commenters actually tried it ha ha

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I don't see a link either, even when browsing the original post on the instance that you posted it to.

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Since for some people, the edit didn't work.

This is the link https://stirante.github.io/lemmy-discover/

Federation is a bit weird sometimes. Edits, deletions, and mod actions don't always federate very quickly or even at all sometimes.

What's weird to me is I saw the edit (with the link) on this account, my main account on lemmy.world, when you first posted it, since I clearly followed the link to try it out. I don't know if all the DDoS stuff messed something up or the admins had to restore from an old backup or something, but that edit with the link isn't reflecting anymore on my lemmy.world account or my alt at lemm.ee.

I very much appreciate the effort, but is there any reason I should use this instead of the pre-existing Lemmyverse.net?

I wanted to focus a single community at once and make a sneak peak of it all which is some numbers, description and top 10 posts. This way it's less likely to accidentally skip some cool community. Also this shows you random ones and not some type of list so you're exposed to more niche ones.

Anyways I think lemmyverse is also cool, just a different approach to discovery of new communities.

Pretty good. It's kind of like Stumbleupon for Lemmy communities. The only "issue" I saw is it includes the forbidden no-no instances that are defederated by a lot of the bigger instances for being... troublesome.

I used the list from browse.feddit.de. I didn't know it includes defederated ones. I'll try to exclude these.

I honestly don't know how it should be. I'll leave that up to you. I wasn't logged in when I was going through communities. So that might be a way to filter them out easily - if you can pull a list of blocked instances from users' home instances once they log in.

I just pushed an update. If you log in, it will fetch defederated instances from your instance as well as communities you already follow and hide them.

That was quick! Logged in and went through a few skips. Not seeing anything worth noting, which is a good thing. I appreciate that it also pulls from smaller instances I've never even heard of.

This is really nice; I second another person's opinion that it resembles a stumbleupon just for lemmy. Some kind of "Not Interested" button would be a good idea, though I don't know how feasible that is.

At any rate, it's a really cool tool, and I appreciate your having made it. I'm excited to see if/how it develops.

Would be cool if it blocked already subscribed communities, and also made those that aren't federated already on small instances to try and federate.

Crazily unsecure I guess (you write your password into an unknown site) but crazily cool, it's so hard finding communities!!

Cheers!

The code is open source, the build process is open on GitHub actions and it's hosted on GitHub pages so you also see compiled site easily. The password never leaves your browser apart from going to the instance you chose when logging in. The password also is not saved, only the access token.

I tried my best at making it as transparent as possible.

Logins with 2FA aren't working, is it possible to fix?

I think this was much needed, thanks! I used to use Random on Reddit to discover new subreddits.

This is really cool. I think why it won't let you subscribe sometimes is because the smaller subs aren't acknowledged by your signed in instance yet. You have to search from your signed in instance for that particular community, go to it, and then subscribe. Great tool though, thanks.

Looks neat I'll check it out. Would be cool if you could login and it would pull your subscribed communities and then come up with similar communities based on already subbed ones. Cheers.

I'd love to do that, but that would require me having info on all users' followed communities. Then I could cluster communities based on shared subscribed users and actually recommend communities. Basically if user A follows X, Y and Z, user B follows X, Y and Z and you follow X, then you might be interested in Y and Z.

Or some simple alternative would be to tag communities, but again someone would have to do it.

The Fediverse population seems generally quite hostile towards algorithms, but i would love something like that. Discoverability is a huge issue on Lemmy right now. Apart from searching on lemmyverse.net/communities, we basically only have !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl

Loving the tool - but when i try to login and put in the instance of kbin.social it gives me an error

Sorry, I never tested it with Kevin. I suspect the API is somewhat different from lemmy

This is super cool!

I don't think login works if you have 2FA, but not a huge problem :)

Good idea! I'll incorporate something like this in my own Lemmy App.

Too bad there's already a community search function.