In this federated world, I find myself going back to lemmyverse.net to see if a community already exists, or if there are any duplicates already, etc.
Also, in lemmyverse you can actually search instances themselves, which is quite interesting too. Maybe being able to check out some instance’s local communities would be awesome too.
Instead of relying on an external service, which may go down if the maintainers get bored, I think this would be a part of lemmy itself. As in, every instance would maintain an index of all of the other instances it knows about. I’m thinking the process would look something like this:
- Your instance broadcasts that is open for federation
- Another instance either approves federation by broadcasting its own message
- Instances go out and update their index regularly (daily or weekly) with instances they’re federated with
This wouldn’t require a ton of storage because all it really needs is community name, basic stats, and maybe a short blurb.
check out some instance’s local communities
Yeah, I agree. There’s a bug for switching your default instance, and perhaps it could be implemented as an anonymous “account” where you could switch between them at will. Basically, you’d “login” without a username, and you’d just have certain features disabled, like voting and commenting.