"Lemmy Explorer" a new website to explore Lemmy communities and instances

grehund@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 416 points –
lemmyverse.net

Not mine, just cross-posting.

80

you know what I really wish, some easier way to be able to subscribe to a community on a remote instance from your own account. Like a shared login or some browser extension that sees you're on a lemmy and allows you to subscribe from your account back home

maybe I'm using it wrong, but right now If I'm browsing lemmy explorer and find a community on lemmy.ca, I have to copy the address manually and then go back and find it on my local lemmy where I have my account to add it

What you're describing is one of the root issues with the current system. It's the same reason that if your instance goes down, your account and history go with it. I'd love to see an implementation of some sort of account awareness like you said, which could also make it easier to backup history to another instance in the event that your primary goes down.

Oh this would be nice, a standardized way to back up instances so in the case of one going down forever someone else could pick it up and start running.

I know I'm happy to run my instance, I have a great fiber line and a solid infrastructure, but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow I'd want someone else to pick it up and get running

A one-click account transfer to a different instance would be great. However, there can be several "gotchas", maybe the target instance has lower "permissions", so that can lead to data loss. Eg: my instance doesn't allow pictures more than 100 kb, some other instance doesn't allow creation of communities. So this needs to be carefully throughout.

Seems the easiest solution to that would be to simply have a comparison view. The permissions are setup using some sort of sta.dardized method, yes? Config file, GUI, whatever. Certainly it wouldn't be hard to simply grab and organize a list of perms from both instances and toss em up side by side. Could even add notes (i.e. if photo storage on Instance A > Instance B notify use "migrating to this instance may cause some larger photos to be removed from your account").

I'm not a professional programmer (sys admin, so mostly just automation) but there are certainly solutions to this.

oh I was thinking a full instance backup. As an instance admin it'd be nice to backup the whole thing in a standardized way so someone else could grab it and spin it up if I collapsed tomorrow, all the community and users

If the instance is setup as a docker container, then it should be easy. The following should be transferred

  • docker-compose file
  • zipped up volume directory

At the destination, the docker volume dirs should be unzipped and the new paths should be updated in the docker-compose file. I'm sure someone would have made a script for this by now.

Which is what I'm doing, and I store the backups securely, but then there's no standardized way of "Hey the admin is gone, can we take over" ability. I could tell my community here are the backups, but then there's just no standardized way of transferring admin. Idk, I think most things online should have a "Will and testament" type thing. "This passes to XXX"

It's the main reason for mastodon feeling so off. Subbing to a community is something I can deal with, but having a network where you need to follow individuals and the way of doing it is cumbersome sucks. All of these places would benefit greatly if there was a solution.

I'd be interested in something like a lightweight CDN/replication with OAuth2 for logging into other instances. Each instance 'replicates' your original account but isn't itself the master. One can be promoted to master in the event of an outage effectively migrating your account.

Would make for some difficult security considerations given a rogue instance could attempt to hijack authority.

I'm not much of a programmer and my free time is too limited to move quickly, but the functionality looks possible based on the published frontend API. Someone will almost certainly beat me to it, but I am hoping to write a browser extension that replaces the blue "You are not logged in..." boilerplate text about how to subscribe to a remote community with a subscribe button that does the dirty work in the background for you.

that would be amazing! even just like a hover popup or secondary link to send me to the community but through my instance would help a lot

You can do exactly that. Use the search function at the top of Beehaw, specifically type in the URL of the community like this: !ttrpgs@lemmy.blahaj.zone
This way you'll reach that community while still "on" Beehaw and can subscribe to it. From there, you can head to your subscribed communities from your profile to make new posts or whatever.

I don't think you understood what I was suggesting.

Use the search function at the top of Beehaw

I don't use Beehaw (my instance is lemm.ee), but let's pretend I do. My whole premise is I don't always start there. Like if run into a community on Lemmy Explorer or some other site (maybe a google search?), I can easily find myself on a community on a remote server.

For example, can you click here: https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions

What do you see? Any way to subscribe for you? It just tells you to go back home and search for it I would love there to be a browser extension or plugin that automatically recognizes the community's instance and address and sends it back home to Beehaw for you to subscribe. Can be via API or just redirect you to Beehaw's view of it

This is great! Feature request... Can you add this functionality to allow people to sub tho these communities easy. It's what I'm doing in a little javascript that has helped me tremendously!

  • Set a homeInstance type variable (ie; https://lemmy.ml) - manually inputted or select from found instances?
  • Add a button that links to "homeInstance + "/search/q/!" + community + "@" + site + "/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1""
    • site is remoteinstance.whatever

That will take someone straight to being able to sub from their instance.

looks like OP is not one of the devs of this site. You should forward this idea to the github page that is linked there, as it's a great idea.

This is huge. Now take this data and tag each community with the closest subreddit and use the api to build a thing where you can plug your reddit user and Lemmy user to recreate your reddit account on Lemmy

๐Ÿคฏ

To be fair, browse.feddit.de already did this

For some reason, browse.feddit.de only caches our Episodes community, but lemmyverse.net caches our entire instance. ๐Ÿค”

I think I got it figured out. Spacing! And the two services look for different things.

Really well done! Much better to browse than browse.feddit.de I just wish you could "login" and hide the communities you're already subscribed to :p

That one was missing a bunch of instances and communities for some reason, too. I'm glad we've got this new way to look at everything.

650 servers?? they were just a bunch when I joined a week ago, that's a crazy growth!

p.s thanks for crossposting, site is very useful

I personally don't understand what's wrong with communities tab, it seems to give a pretty similar list to this when you apply filters looking for the most popular of all communities.

If no one in my instance has subscribed or looked for a community, I won't be able to find it with the search unless I have its address.

I find this really useful for small instances that donโ€™t have a large communities tab.

Wow. As a newcomer trying to make the leap over from Reddit, thatโ€™s really nice

Blows my mind that a good chunk of this just didn't exist a month or two ago

Not sure if it is just me or is the problem on my work laptop, but Firefox is giving me a "Potential Security Risk Ahead" warning when trying to access the link.

Firefox isn't giving me that warning on my desktop, at least. Do you have HTTPS-Only mode on in Firefox security settings, maybe? I used to have that on, but it gave me false security risk errors all the time for some reason (no idea why) for a lot of websites. Especially it'd tell me a site didn't allow a secure connection/https, but then if I bypassed it and went to the site anyway, sure enough the url would actually show https and the little secure connection lock symbol, so as far as I can tell https is actually working fine.

If you're on a public network though I suppose interception is also a risk, when you're logging into things.

This is actually awesome. Thanks so much for this! It can definitely help bridge the gap a bit between traditional Rexxit paradigms and Fediverse ones.

How is the instances list created? I just created my own instance last night and it's already in that list. Are all federated instances automatically listed?

I think it can be some sort of BFS/DFS method to find all instances.

Yeah, I'd guess the same. I wonder how well that'd scale as the number of instances grows larger and larger...

This is extremely useful. I wanted to post a story about China but didn't know where until this post showed up. With this I get an overview over the instances which have China related Communities and they are sorted by users/posts/comments. This is amazing! Thanks for sharing it!

Oh and I checked it and my single user instance is there too :D

What does the exclamation mark do e.g. in this?

!news@beehaw.org

From my understanding, it's an indicator that differentiates Lemmy links from email addresses.

If you follow the link conventions, !technology@beehaw.org should link to a Lemmy community, rather than open a new email compose window.

Do you know if it is normal that Jerboa crashes when trying to open Lemmy links? I assume on desktop it works correctly, but I haven't used it as much.

I remember it working properly for me earlier but when I clicked the link in the comment you replied to, jerboa crashed for me too. maybe a regression or just something about this link causing a problem

Whould be nice to have a similar syntax that links that community as reflected in the current user's current instance.

There is one but you gotta manually apply it atm and it doesnt work on the android app at least. if you link to "/c/community@instance.com" and have it as a hyperlink it will go to that community from your instance. Thats what the person you replied to did, if you check their comments source

I love this!! Thanks for the link.

There is so much Lemmy to go around. Cross posting this explorer for finding communities.

This is awesome! I love seeing the whole community here like this!

This looks like a great resource! However, I'm having trouble subscribing to some lemmy communities on kbin. I tried copying the community name into the kbin magazine search but nothing is found. Do I just need to wait for federation issues to be fixed or is there something I need to do to "push" communication between different instances?
(Edit: I didn't even realize at first that this post is on beehaw. Looks like I still have some work to do getting acclimated to the fediverse.)

On Kbin if the community you want isn't showing in the magazine list, what you need to do is go to the search bar that searches the whole site and type in the Lemmy community name followed by an @ followed by the instance name. For example: firefox@lemmy.ml

After searching it should come up and you can subscribe to it. It only shows up in the magazines list once someone on the instance subscribes to it, so if you are the first to subscribe to it you have to do a manual search first

It worked! Thank you so much!
I didn't realize that searches for outside communities need to be done in the general search bar and not in the magazine search.

I only see one search on my mobile view. Where is the general search bar located?

What I called the general search is the magnifying glass icon at the top of the page on mobile. To get to the magazine search you have to tap the general search then tap magazines on the next page.

I have the hamburger menu, which has a magnifying glass. There is no magazine option for me, and the general search seems to not find communities others haven't subscribed to yet :/ I know v0.17 has some issues, some of which only affect some users, maybe I'm some users. Or maybe I'm missing something.

Hmmm, it looks like you joined a different instance, "@infosec.pub" while I'm on "@kbin.social". I'm not sure how that is affecting things since I'm still trying to figure this out myself. You might need to ask for details on a local @infosec.pub community. I did find out that for this to work you have to get the syntax for the community you want to join exactly right in your search. For example, if you were searching for technology at beehaw you would have to search "technology@beehaw.org" without any leading @ or !.

Ah that makes sense. I did try !..., @..., full URL, and just the name. Oh, well. It's possible that that particular community chose not to federate, maybe? I'm not sure if it can be on the community level or only on the instance level. Either way, thank you so much for your help! Seriously appreciate it!

Did the crawler break? Seems like it hasn't updated in a while.