Community Search Tips

Today we learned about Lemmy Explorer, a Lemmy instance and community search tool. It uses a crawler to collect information from Lemmy Fediverse servers, scanning each server once every 12 hours. With this tool you can sort your searches by more criteria than the community search at feddit.de:

• Subscriber Count
• Active User Count
• Post Count
• Comment Count

The default sorting method is called "Smart Sort," which we haven't been able to find documentation about yet.

A quick search for an Apple community yields strange results. !apple@lemmy.ml shows up first when sorted by posts, but !selfsovereignid@exploding-heads.com is the second search result, which merely mentions Apple Wallet in their sidebar and has nothing to do with Apple. Sixth on the list is !destiny@lemmy.world, which doesn't even mention Apple anywhere -- sidebar or otherwise.

Right now it looks like this is another way to see Lemmy servers and communities, but probably not the best method to compare them to each other and find the right community for you. For now let's call it another arrow in the quiver, but not the best search tool.

Our friends at feddit.de have created a live search tool for Lemmy communities! Type in your search term and the community browser will show you a list of communities sorted by total number of posts (descending). This will help ensure that you pick the most active variant of a particular community.

The search results will give you three major blocks of information.

1. The direct URL and a copy URL button. Use this URL in the community search box.
2. The name of the community. You can click this to read the community sidebar and see if the community is right for you.
3. Vital statistics (instance URL, post, comment, and subscriber counts).

So far it doesn't look like it will show you any kbin magazines (what kbin calls a community). Rest assured you can still search for and find kbin magazines the old fashioned way -- just not with browse.feddit.de.

Asif Youssuff assembled this short list of subreddits and corresponding kbin or Lemmy communities that have sprung up to replace them. It's organized into subscriber count buckets, making it easier to evaluate whether the replacement community is active enough for your subscription.

Lemmy is a federated news aggregator, which means that most of the posts and communities that have the most activity don't reside on this server. At Lemmy.ninja, we do a lot of work trying to find those remote communities and make them easy for you to find and subscribe to.

If you're looking for a community, head to our community list and click on "all." When we find a good, active remote community, we make sure to subscribe to it so that it appears there. This list will continually grow!

edit: Well, in the intervening days since this post, we've changed from an allow-list approach to a block-list approach when it comes to federating with other communities. Doing this had an unexpected impact on our community list -- it started auto-populating. That means that it's slowly filling with communities that we haven't curated. That's okay, though; as we grow, you can use the subscriber counts on the community list to get an idea of what is popular across all of the Lemmy and kbin communities!

If you're new to Lemmy, it can be hard to find communities to subscribe to. Unlike monolithic sites like Reddit, federated sites require you to discover the communities (and the sites they reside on) yourself.

Here at lemmy.ninja, we've found a lot of good communities that you can access from the communities section of this server. To find more, I decided to plumb one of the largest Lemmy sites, lemmy.ml, to see what its users are subscribed to. I took the top 2000 sites listed at lemmy.ml and sorted them according to the number of posts in the community. Check out the full list here.

Keep in mind that the list heavily favors communities on lemmy.ml, but it's a start!