Cross-posted from !fediverse@piefed.social
I’m the maintainer of Catodon, which offers both microblogging and forums (Lemmy-compatible communities), and we noticed that discoverability is not the threadiverse’s strongest point: Our server only showed forums/communities that it “knew” because someone from the server already followed them. In Reddit it’s easy to see if there is a community for a subject you care about; on the Fediverse it’s not that easy.
So I looked at what indexes there are, and most were focused in Lemmy - lemmyverse.net has added MBin and PieFed explorers, but I was looking for something that covers more platforms, and is a unified directory, rather than per-platform only. Maybe there is something that I missed, but I didn’t find what I was looking for: a directory for the threadiverse. So I decided to build it.
The Threadiverse Catalog lists forums/communities from Catodon, Discourse, Friendica, Lemmy, Mbin, Mobilizon, NodeBB and PieFed. It hasn’t been online for many days, so it hasn’t indexed everything, but we already list over 20.000 forums/communities. If there are any bugs or other issues, please let me know.
We built this primarily for Catodon, and on our latest release (26.10.0 “Bongo Cat”) users have access to its results through the in-app Search and Explore features, but it’s open for everyone to use. It’s open source and written in Go. Other projects are also welcome to use it.
Cheers =)
#threadiverse #fediverse #catodon #discourse #friendica #lemmy #mbin #mobilizon #nodebb #piefed
It’s excellent! Just two ideas I’d suggest:
- Ability to search/list all indexed forums/communities belonging to specific instances/servers indexed by the catalog; for example, having a Instance picker alongside the “Platforms” dropdown. It’s not something that would fetch non-indexed instances, but rather something that would filter among the already-indexed ones.
- Speaking of “Platforms” dropdown, either some kind of general toggle/switch and/or some kind of “filter by this specific platform” so, for example, in order to search for a specific platform (e.g. Lemmy), one doesn’t need to toggle off the switches for all the other platforms (currently the search form is default “all”; as more platforms and derivatives get eventually added, toggling 'em all off just to filter one platform will eventually become a problem)
Also, just to confirm, is lemmy.eco.br (and to a certain extent bolha.forum which only lists one community while they do have many) not in the list because of their usage of Cloudflare (and Anubis in case of bolha.forum)?
Good ones, will work on them in the next days!
About the two servers, I don’t know - our crawler needs a few days to go through everything for the initial listing, so it might just not have gotten to them yet. But the best way is to use the form to suggest a community from each of these servers. which will introduce them to the catalog.