I’m resuming my work on Fediverser, and I need as much help as I can get to build the Recommended community map. This crowdsourced data will be one the key points for instance admins that want to make use of the Fediverser services, and it will help immensely for people who want to migrate away from Reddit.
How does it work? The front-page gives you a list of all the subreddits with its corresponding recommendations of Lemmy communities. The ones that have no recommendation go to the top of the page. One example. You can open the page for that subreddit entry and make all the suggestions that you think are appropriate.
Every suggestion goes into a queue which I can then review and merge to the main database.
One of the things that I will be adding soon is the ability to request a community to be created. For subreddits which there is no equivalent community, people will be able to fill a form (similar to the “Create Community” page on Lemmy’s default client) which will check what is the best participating instance in the network, and if the instance admins approve, the instance can be created right away.
How can you help?
- Categorize the subreddits that have no entry.
- Reaching out to the mods of the uncategorized subreddits
- Creating community requests for the ones that are still missing.
Thank you!
If you want me to help out, I’m gonna need a more mobile friendly design. I can’t use laptop due to disability.
I will see if I can some improvements. In the meantime, can you please tell me if it’s possible to work by switching to Desktop mode and landscape?
IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?
Sub : Community
- askreddit : asklemmy
- amitheasshole : asklemmy
- explainlikeimfive : asklemmy
- gaming : gaming
- pcmasterrace : gaming
- minecraft : gaming
- etc, etc.
I agree, but I think we need to be a little more granular than this. We don’t need to create a 1:1 mapping for every subreddit, but if at least we can make it in a way that each subreddit has a recommendation in a adjacent sub-category, it will be better than just pointing to the closest/most popular community in the higher-level category.
Imagine if you are into one specific genre of games and subscribed to a bunch of different subreddits through the years for the games you enjoy. When you come to Lemmy, the recommendation is simply that you signup to a generic “Gaming” community, only to find out that no one is really talking much about your niche genre. You’d be more likely to say “this recommendation is non-sense” than “ok, I will start posting content related to the things I am interested about”.
I suppose there’s an element of preference as well. If !myinterest@instance exists and is limping along with 80 subscribers and a post once a month, is that less discouraging? Maybe 300 subs and a post every other day is adequate? At the risk of scope creep, maybe the answer lies in more data and options to account for the preferences of those new to the Fediverse. I concede I don’t have answers though, and I’m obviously putting less work into it than you are.
Fight the good fight, friend. I need more posts about old TV shows and niche hobbies, so we just need more decent people, however they arrive. :-)
This is a great project! I’ll try to help out later (site seems to be down at the moment).
I do have some questions/concerns with this part:
One of the things that I will be adding soon is the ability to request a community to be created. For subreddits which there is no equivalent community, people will be able to fill a form (similar to the “Create Community” page on Lemmy’s default client) which will check what is the best participating instance in the network, and if the instance admins approve, the instance can be created right away.
- Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?
- How would the “best participating instance” be determined?
- How long would this process take?
We’ve deliberated for several days on the “best instance” for a community, and getting instance admin approval can also take time in some cases. This seems to be at odds with the “right away” goal.
Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion. Creating new communities is not the challenge. Growing them is.
seems to be down at the moment
DNS. It’s always DNS… It’s back now.
To answer your questions:
Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?
Ideally, the answer to this is “the users who sign up to a fediversed instance and see their favorite subreddit missing on the list of recommendations.” If this is going to be true, I honestly do not know.
How would the “best participating instance” be determined?
By the categorization matching. If someone wants to make a community to bring a local community (e.g, for a city in Australia) it would try to match the request with aussie.zone. If it’s a science focused subreddit, it should try to match it with mander.xyz, etc. Granted, this assumes that those instances are participating and using the fediverser software on their side, and at the moment I’m the only one doing, but the idea of the whole project is to create incentive for instance admins to use it.
How long would it take?
A request should trigger some type of message to the admin. So, “as long as it takes for the admin to act on the message”?
Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion
100% agree. This is why the other leg of this creature is the “Community Ambassadors” feature, which is meant to help people to grow their communities and find them content.
Seems similar to the work done by https://sub.rehab
sub.rehab is definitely the first, but it has not been active for quite a while, is not focused on fediverse groups (also list Discord as alternatives) and I reckon that our database is already larger than theirs.
Ah good to know, shame it’s been left by the wayside a bit. Was super useful in the early days
Is there way to help without signing into reddit and granting account access?
Great question and thank you for your interesting in helping. Authentication via Reddit OAuth does not give “access” to the account. Reddit will send only your username and the list of subreddits you have subscribed to. I’ve set it up this way to help build out the list of subreddits.
In any case, you are right that other authentication methods are needed. I’ll change the setup soon to allow “traditional” sign-up, and I can also add other signup methods.
That would be good, a lot of people deleted their reddit accounts because of Spez & Co.
Yeah, totally understandable. I was going to suggest you to create a throwaway account, but then I realized that I am actually considering denying access to newly created accounts precisely to avoid bots and sockpuppets.
I’ve added some alternatives to subreddits but I also saw that my Lemmy communities aren’t categorized yet. Is there a way for me to do that or do you have to do that?
Thank you! Communities can be managed on https://fediverser.network/communities. You can add them by going to https://fediverser.network/communities/create.
