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

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

lemmyverse.net is the closest thing I've seen to this, and my experience has been that it has problems with timeouts when used over a slow connection, so I think that this will be useful to many.

EDIT: Note that it does have some useful features that might be useful to replicate, like:

Showing post and comment count (not sure if this is applicable to all instance types)
A tri-state setting for NSFW content, so that someone could search only for NSFW content rather than only not for NSFW content.
Currently, lemmyverse.net does some processing of the Markdown text in the description to plain text to make it more readable. For example, for !technology@lemmy.world, this is lemmyverse.net's description:

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles. Our Rules Follow the lemmy.world rules. Only tech related news or articles. Be excellent to each other! Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day. Threads asking for personal tech support may be

And on the Threadiverse Catalog:

This is a [most excellent](https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExN3N0NmhuODNib3d3Nzg0OHU2bTFqMXAzNW42Y2JsOTVmenNsNG8ycSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/l46CDHTqbmnGZyxKo/giphy.gif) place for…

I'm not sure whether Catodon uses Markdown in its community descriptions or not.

I'm not familiar with Catodon, so I don't know if these would also be valuable for Catodon or not; might not be worth your effort if not.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 2 points 1 week ago

All three implemented, thanks!