I think it would be very useful to be able to browse communities by instance. For example I’d like to be able to search an instance name and get a list of all the communities @ that instance. It would help to get a feel for the vibe of a particular instance without having to leave the app, and also be good for community discovery.
Another way to do this would be to be able to browse the Local feed of another instance than your own, but I can imagine that this would be more difficult to implement.
I think, for how Lemmy is structured right now, you wouldn’t see all the communities, but just those that other users in your instance already searched for. there’s no automatic global directory for communities, and I think it would be impossible to do given the decentralised nature of the fediverse.
what it could be done though, is that each instance maintains a manifesto of all their communities, and updates all their connected and federated instances with the updated list. I doubt Lemmy is doing this now, but it could be good food for future features.
Each instance does have a list of all their communities, but this would probably require the app to detect that an instance list is being requested (e.g. the query starts with “@“), and then make the API call to that instance instead of the user’s home one.
I don’t think this would be impossible to do. but for sure you would never get all the communities of ALL the instances… but only of those already connected with your instance.
I don’t see why not, if you call out to Beewaw you can get all the Beehaw communities without even being authenticated afaik. No need to get the user’s “home”(?) instance involved at all.
because there’s not just beehaw and lemmy.world. there are thousands of instances and there’s no way to know them all, unless you or someone else knows that instance and searches for it.
The hostname is part of the search query, and they all have the same api.
Yes, that’s the exact use case described in the post.
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