Feedly is the closest thing to Google Reader that I’ve found.

Community discovery that spans all federated instances should be one of the top things that development should be working on. And it should be integrated into Lemmy, not as a separate website people have to go to and search.

Peoples are lazy. They don’t want to have to go to some separate website and then search for something. And lets not even get started on the difficulties of adding a remote community if your instance doesn’t know it exists, its wonky at best.

If a user cant type “Stephen King community” in the search bar on their instance and then get results, they are either going to assume it doesn’t exist and give up OR they are going to be hitting that “Create Community” button.

Of the themed instances that exist now, I’d be willing to bet that in addition to their local communities they host that they also subscribe to other communities that aren’t strictly related to whatever theme they are going with.

For example, I’m sure the Star Trek instance also subscribes to the lemmy@lemmy.ml community so the admin can stay abreast of Lemmy news. And probably also follows other technology related communities as well.

I think most people would just want to gravitate to whatever they want to be identified with. There’s nothing stopping you from joining a music themed instance and then adding some non-music subscriptions to your list. It doesn’t force those subs on anyone else on the instance.

And if you don’t want to be identified with any specific topic or community, you can always join a general Lemmy instance like Beehaw or Lemmy.world and subscribe to whatever you like piecemeal.

That’s not how Lemmy works. You just need an account on ONE instance. And then subscribe to all the communities that interest you, some may be local to your instance and some may be hosted on other instances.

Honestly, I hope not.

For example, if all the “programming” communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn’t take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.

There’s nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that’s what should happen.

I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn’t mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to create a new community. I’m saying that due diligence should be taken BEFORE creating a new community, to be sure that community doesn’t already exist.

Hot take. I think the instances that are trying to be Reddit are the ones that give their users carte blanche to create new communities without any thought of looking to see if the same community exists elsewhere. I’d prefer that community creation be limited to the admins of each instance, that way they could - hopefully - at least do a cursory search to see if the community exists already and then just add it to THEIR instances subscriptions. There’s a reason why every community shouldn’t be on a single instance. It’s a single point of failure.

If you are familiar with Docker, you can easily run it in your existing VPS. It doesn’t use a lot of resources.

If you are not familiar with Docker, you should look in to it.

https://docker-curriculum.com/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-beginners-guide-to-docker-how-to-create-your-first-docker-application-cc03de9b639f/

I guess at the end of the day that I don’t have many concerns for privacy. I am not searching for things that might get me on a watch list. Searching from my private instance is no more/less secure in terms of privacy than it would be if I did a Google search. The search endpoints (Google, Bing, DDG, etc) all know the IP that the search is coming from even if its passing through SearXNG first. So if I was doing something shady, I could easily be tracked down that way.

The main reason I run my own SearXNG is so I can strip ads and search multiple search providers from a single search.

I tried doing that with a previously unsearched/unsubscribed community as a test on my own instance, and I got a 404: couldnt_find_community error when clicking the link. As you stated, it seems like in most cases that special link will not work unless someone has previously manually searched for the same community in your instance.

I think I’d rather link directly to the instance for the community than get a 404 error. For most people, getting the 404 will just deter them from proceeding further.

Perhaps it would be best to include both links in a post?

Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.

At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.

Yes you can subscribe to and read that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.

Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)

This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.

On the next page, change the search dropdown from Communities to ALL.

You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.

Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribers

Click it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”

Done

Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.

Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.

Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.

I really like SearxNG for searching. It combines results from multiple search engines (that you define). And strips out advertisements. You can host your own SearxNG instance if you are in to self hosting, or you can use one of the many available public instances.

If you don’t run your own search (SearxNG) and dont use pihole, you can get the uBlacklist extension for chrome/firefox to blacklist Reddit in search results on Google/Bing/DDG/etc.

To deter myself further, I even went so far as to block any search results from Reddit in my SearxNG instance.

If anyone else is interested.

In settings.yml uncomment the following, they are commented out by default

enabled_plugins:

- 'Hostname replace' # see hostname_replace configuration below

hostname_replace:

Then add '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': false under hostname_replace, restart SearxNG and bobs your uncle.

Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.

Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.

I was explaining it to a friend today, and I decided that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.