Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.

I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Doing it in a federated way.

Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.

[–] Jamie@jamie.moe 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can completely understand why that wouldn't be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.

I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.

*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few 100 instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn't be onerous for a one-time download.