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Lemmy community discoverability is not user-friendly and can be improved App side (lemmy.zip)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by MrSoup@lemmy.zip to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I've introduced two of my friends (not into tech) to Lemmy. Since they're not into tech this is their first web forum.

I've explained the federation thru the usual email metaphore and that's ok, but to lookup for communities is not quite there on client side.

Let me explain.
He wanted to see all the communities on an instance because that instance is in his native language but he's registered on another instance. So to see all those communities you must go on instance.domain/communities, copy the name of the community you are interessed in and paste it inside the app/web client to look it up.

And to see all the communities all over the fediverse you must use lemmyverse.net which is a cool site, but still you got to copy paste back and forth to the app.

This could be implementend inside app itself by listing all communities and add ability to filter by things like instance.

Obviously open to discussion about the issue itself and how that could be improved.

Feel free to tag apps/clients devs to ear their opinion too.

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[-] Natanael@slrpnk.net 5 points 6 months ago

You must use your home instance as a proxy.

If you find a post elsewhere you have to take its URL and put it into your own instance's search function, and it will recognize it as a post on another lemmy instance and retrieve it for you.

You can also use search from your instance to go looking for things outside your instance which it already knows about.

Mastodon has made this easier by asking what your home instance is when you try to interact with a post on their domain without being logged in, and then it redirects you to a view of that same post from your own instance. Lemmy could do the same.