I keep see people complaining about not being able to find active communities that match their interests. So I’ve added a new feature to https://www.search-lemmy.com/ that allows you to search posts for a particular topic and then it tells you which communities have the most posts matching your search query.
And assuming that you’ve set your home instance correctly, those links will even open up in your home instance, so that you can subscribe directly to them.
For example, if you search for ‘linux’ (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux&page=1) it gives you a link to each community, tells you which instance it’s on and how many matches it found for your query.
All of the same filters that you can use on the normal search can be used here as well. So if you just want to find the best community that mentions linux on lemmy.world (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux+instance%3Alemmy.world&page=1), you can filter by just that instance. Click on the Search Tips button to see a list of all of the available filters.
P.S. I’m aware of https://lemmyverse.net/ etc… and while those are great as well, this allows you to search to see what people are actually talking about on the various communities.
Again, if you have any feature requests or find any bugs, PLEASE reach out or ideally go to my github (https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search) and log a bug there.
Can you add kbin.social, fedia.io and kglitch.social to the list of home instances? You’d just have to replace the /c/ in links to communities with /m/. This community is at https://kglitch.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.world for me, for example.
I imagine making kbin instances searchable with your tool would require quite a bit more work.
It’s on my to-do list. Sadly though, in order for something to show in the drop-down for home instances that means I must have previously crawled that site. Because my #1 requirement is that if you click a link it must open in your home instance. Good news is, is that Kbin and Lemmy work nearly identical to each other, so Kbin will be the first non-lemmy type of instances that you can search.
@remindme in 4 weeks
Lol. I guess I better have this working in 4 weeks. /jk
Just my first uninformed guess at how long you might take 😉
I’ve already started to abstract away Lemmy from the search engine itself. So the first steps are in place. Once I get the kinks of the 0.4.x release knocked out then I plan on reading up on Kbin’s API and I’ll start working on the crawler. I can’t promise anything but that should give you a rough timeline.
If you have any programming skills I could always use a hand.
Also, last I heard (about 10 days ago, things might have changed since then) kbin’s API doesn’t quite exist yet. It’s one of the reasons the Artemis App’s source code isn’t open yet; hariette plans to make it open source once she can switch from scraping the website to an actual API and scrub the scraping from the code base.
Bummer. That’ll slow down Kbin’s inclusion into this. Well once it is available I’m sure I’ll start digging into it. But thanks for the info.
Technically I do, but they’re in css, vanilla javascript and rusty PHP4/PHP5. Programming was and mostly is a hobby for me.
Well except for Siemens SCL/FDB, I need to know that for work, but that’s for industrial control circuits and quite a different beast.
@remindme in 4 weeks
@remindme
Sorry for the reply spam, first time I tried using the remindme bot
@remindme 1 month
@remindme 4 weeks