Discoverability in this context meaning the ability to more effectively find public communities/people of interest. Alongside improving this however, respecting people’s decisions on whether and how they may be found, if at all.
A global communities search that’s integrated into all lemmy software. Meaning like i would go to a communities search bar and type “politics” and it’ll show me all /politics communities on all instances, sorted by subscriber count.
And all communities should have a button right up at the front that’s labeled “see similar communities”, which would take you to that search result page.
I’ve been finding discoverability pretty good on Lemmy, but maybe that’s in part because the server I picked grew to be the largest not long after. Mastodon and the various microblog workalikes seem to have bigger problems there.
- Backfill statuses when loading profiles from remote servers (Mastodon and workalikes)
- Full text search, on by default, without a heavyweight dependency (Mastodon-specific)
- Relay replies to all participants in a conversation (Mastodon)
- An optional recommended feed with an algorithm (I know that’s a bad word!) based on favorites and boosts by people who often favorite/boost the same things you do
I think algorithms are fine if they’re completely transparent and customizable. Knowing exactly why you’re seeing what you’re seeing and being able to choose different ‘lenses’ to view the fediverse through would be awesome. Just having some mixable sorting options would make a big difference on the microblog side.
I suppose we have some choice as certain fediverse platforms handle this slightly differently. However, I think a focus on user-driven algorithms could make these platforms even more compelling than they already are.
I think perfect discoverability is a property of centralized systems and that we need to be extremely careful when working on this problem so that we don’t lose sight of why the Fediverse was created.
Can we get the ability to browse another instances local feed while signed in to our home instance? Feel like it would be better to discover smaller communities that way
An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.
I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.
It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.
