EDIT: Sorry I did not make this clear. I am not presenting this as a techincal problem for admins to solve, but as a community problem. The kbin.social community as the larger instance is not seeking out communities from the smaller instances.
When searching for magazines (communities) the results almost always show either kbin.social or one of the major Lemmy instances.
I can pull the domains like https://kbin.social/d/fedia.io but when i try to pull a community like https://kbin.social/m/boardgames@fedia.io I get a 404 error.
To compound the problem lemmy communities are much more discoverable because they are listed on https://browse.feddit.de/. So even kbin users are largely interacting more through lemmy communities.
As far as I know there is no such tool to browse or search communities across all kbin instances. Does anyone know if the lemmy browser can include kbin instances?
Fedia.io, the largest other kbin instance seems to have lots of communities on the vine because we largely do not interact with them. But they see the rest of the fediverse like we do.
If we want other instances to grow like kbin.social has we probably need to resolve this disconnect between kbin communities.
It’s not easy enough to explore other instances and their communities, I feel. I love that we can get a list of mags on kbin.social, but I’d like to see and search communities on our whole federation. Like, if there’s already an instance that has a community for, idk (first random thing on my desk) gummy bears, I don’t want to make another. Awkward case sensitivity makes searching harder than it should be (gummybears? Gummybears? GummyBears?), and I’m often not aware there’s a community I want to follow until it shows up in the random posts list in the sidebar.
But I’m optimistic this will improve with time. “Very early beta” after all!
It should be possible, with some development, to get the full list of magazines on other sites that are currently known to your site. It’s a much, much different thing to get the full list of ActivityPub enabled group-hosting websites, since there’s no central, mandatory directory that they need to phone home to or register with.