I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
The thing is, due to how federation works, this cannot work. Federation is not an automatic thing that happens to instances; instances can only know about other instances if they send a request to another instance or vice versa, to discover them.
The closest thing to a solution will always be things like https://browse.feddit.de, or some implementation of opt-in relays, like the microblogging platforms use.
I need to do some reading on how the fediverse works under the hood but if browse,feddit.de has visbility of all instances then certaintly there is a way for any instance that chooses to federate to have visibility into the fediverse
It doesn’t have visbility of all instances in existence, as this is impossible. What it will do is crawl the “known fediverse”, which is done by crawling known instances and then crawling known instances to those known instances, and so on.
Basically, the Fediverse is just separate websites talking to each other, there is no actual fediverse entity so to speak.
That makes sense, but I am failing to see the issue.
As long as one instance, or any single user from one instance makes that instance aware of the existence of another instance (currently by pasting the url of that instance in the community search), that is now visible and discoverable to all users.
Or worst case, your instance calls some aggregator, like browse.feddit.de to fetch all known instances.
All I am asking for a better UI for viewing content across these instances. What that looks like I am not totally sure. > Communities
I have to admit I’m not sure what you’re asking anymore, what exactly would a “better UI for viewing content across these instances” be? You can already search for communities that your instance knows about (and force it to search for any instances that you know elsewhere) using the search system, and browsing the All feed will show you all posts from communities/instances that your instance knows about as well. Trying searching gaming to see what I mean
I will say the search page feels incredibly disjointed though; I think it should group all the same content (communities, posts, comments) instead of whatever it does right now.
It sounds to me like you’re asking for some sort of discoverability/content recommendations, perhaps? If this is the case, the general Fediverse culture tends to be against this sort of stuff as they see them as systems that promote more screen time and unhealthy habits, instead of actually engaging with what you know you want to engage with.
I think so too, however we need some discoverability of these instances. At the very least we should be able to easily search for and subscribe to communities from different instances, and have some UI to easily navigate these.
The thing is, due to how federation works, this cannot work. Federation is not an automatic thing that happens to instances; instances can only know about other instances if they send a request to another instance or vice versa, to discover them.
The closest thing to a solution will always be things like https://browse.feddit.de, or some implementation of opt-in relays, like the microblogging platforms use.
I need to do some reading on how the fediverse works under the hood but if browse,feddit.de has visbility of all instances then certaintly there is a way for any instance that chooses to federate to have visibility into the fediverse
It doesn’t have visbility of all instances in existence, as this is impossible. What it will do is crawl the “known fediverse”, which is done by crawling known instances and then crawling known instances to those known instances, and so on.
Basically, the Fediverse is just separate websites talking to each other, there is no actual fediverse entity so to speak.
That makes sense, but I am failing to see the issue. As long as one instance, or any single user from one instance makes that instance aware of the existence of another instance (currently by pasting the url of that instance in the community search), that is now visible and discoverable to all users.
Or worst case, your instance calls some aggregator, like browse.feddit.de to fetch all known instances.
All I am asking for a better UI for viewing content across these instances. What that looks like I am not totally sure. > Communities
I mean if you look at https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1, you can already see a bunch of communities from other instances
I have to admit I’m not sure what you’re asking anymore, what exactly would a “better UI for viewing content across these instances” be? You can already search for communities that your instance knows about (and force it to search for any instances that you know elsewhere) using the search system, and browsing the All feed will show you all posts from communities/instances that your instance knows about as well. Trying searching gaming to see what I mean
I will say the search page feels incredibly disjointed though; I think it should group all the same content (communities, posts, comments) instead of whatever it does right now.
It sounds to me like you’re asking for some sort of discoverability/content recommendations, perhaps? If this is the case, the general Fediverse culture tends to be against this sort of stuff as they see them as systems that promote more screen time and unhealthy habits, instead of actually engaging with what you know you want to engage with.