I wasn't sure how to find the communities I'm interested in, so I quickly hacked together a scraper that makes a list of all the communities(1) of all the servers mine is federating to(2).

You can find it (with a very trivial UI) at directory.fstab.sh. Hover over the link to see the description. Use the search bar to search by text.

Is this something useful or there was a better way to do the same?

(1) it does its best to scrape them all but incidents might happen
(2) updated nightly

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[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I really like the "Communities" tab of https://lemmyverse.net

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 2 points 1 year ago

Aha, perfect, so someone made this before! :-D

[–] mancy@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

And if you set your home, you get to open all the links from that instance! It makes it super helpful to subscribe to new communities.

[–] Noit@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is very useful and I’ve added a few communities from this already, so thank you.

If you are taking feature requests, I would ask for the ability to filter out communities with zero posts, as it seems like some lemmys have gone nuts with creating communities that nobody is using yet.

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not quite sure if the 'subscriber' count includes federated subscriptions. Does anyone know?

[–] MrCenny@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does the directory discover communities? As, for instance, this community (!fediverse@lemmy.world) does not exist in the directory.

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This one was on page 3 of lemmy.world, heh. Rolling out the update that tries to scrape all pages proper right now.

[–] MrCenny@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Allright. Good luck 😉

[–] s6original@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks like it might be very helpful on a computer. I never do anything on a computer unless it's absolutely necessary. It might be in this case though. I'd like to check out the Acoustic Guitar community on ml and maybe find out more about bagel transcription.

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I could add another screen to show the description on the phone, I guess. It renders and works fine from the phone, but, obviously, the descriptions are lacking.

[–] s6original@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I can see everything it's just that you can't hover on a phone. It's not a big deal. Nice of you to put this together.

[–] gazoo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Bookmarked! I can filter by instance (domain) and keyword. It's very fast! Thanks for making and sharing this!