NRSK made a small website to introduce new users to the basics of Lemmy and give them an (incomplete) list of Lemmy Communities.
Hopefully this will help users find a lot of interesting content across the network, despite the home instance not federating with a particular community yet.
Such a list was something that was sorely missed when the NRSK administrator first became a user on the lemmyverse, and quite so after creating a new and isolated instance.
As mentioned, it is an unofficial site and if the devs disapprove, I can make the “unofficialness” of it clearer or discuss how we can make it work.
Manually sorting, cataloguing and estimating activity on 283 communities sure was something.
That’s why everybody is welcome to contribute to the list by submitting your own suggestions and corrections in the linked community. As of now the list is curated manually, I assume I’ve made several errors - Particularly when it comes to what “Topic” the different communities belong in.
Yes, you can sort nearly 300 communities by:
- Topic
- Name
- Instance
- Activity
- Recommendation
A lot of it could have been scraped the first time around I assume, but then there’d be no sorting by topic for sure.
You can visit the “Welcome” community by following the post link or visit https://nrsk.no/c/welcome.
Very well written! I think this is very important to point out, especially for people who assume lemmy.ml and Lemmy are the same or assume it’s the “default” instance.
Here’s a good example for this sort of confusion.
It is cool it is free, decentralized, and federated. But of course naturally there is some privilleged POV coming from upstream development besides lemmy.ml is the most popular. join-lemmy.org lists lemmy.ml as first btw; ideally should be randomized.
r u sure bout dat?
Popular category. I think it should be random.
I see what you mean, I thought you were talking about when they promoted lemmy.ml first.
I don’t agree with random. People should be able to at least look for a community that suits their interests.
Someone focused on arts and crafts would probably have a better time at fapsi.be. It can be a make-or-break first experience for new users.
If I remember correctly mastodon tags instances? so join-lemmy could do that too and randomize the instances in a category/tag itself, and randomize sorting the categories
What about a “Pick random general instance” button?
Sure. I was even thinking “what if instances are able to set their own tags to really express what they’re all about”? But then I remembered… The servers are able to set their own description that’s shown on join-lemmy.
but descriptions are not as easily filterable. tags, be it set by the servers or not, are simple enough and do a better job at this, while still showing other information like the description.
The list includes a lot of instances which are essentially inactive, or even full of spam. If the list was randomized, those would often be shown at the top. I think showing most active instances is better, as people will be able to find actual discussions. I would also be open for other sorting suggestions, as long as they dont need manual intervention.
a priority can be implemented to put inactive and unmoderated instances always at the bottom of the category/tag they are listed in, explicitly acknowledging this fact in the interface.
I mentioned that it shouldnt need manual intervention. Otherwise, who will decide which instances count as active? I certainly dont have time for that.