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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 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 [email protected] 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.

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 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 came to the conclusion that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.