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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[–] panos@catodon.rocks 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Thanks to everyone who replied! Most of the suggestions have been implemented and are live on the site. It's great to see such positive feedback! :psi_happy:

[–] m3t00@catodon.rocks 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

shove a link in a menu somewhere. lemmy cross-post search could benefit from a good index. it only seems to know about a few instances.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do you mean in Catodon? We don't have a link because you can already search the Catalog's index through Search and Explore in Catodon! It's the button saying "More from the Fediverse" when the server's search results end. But as we add more search options to the site, it might make sense. I'll think about it when the initial suggestions and changes have settled.

[–] m3t00@catodon.rocks 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

nah talking about lemmy search specifically. probably missing some configs. https://mastodon.social/@dansup has some indexing going on somewhere. prolific dev. i've been using https://fediverse.observer/ occasionally. good to know about search, thanks.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Right - I have no idea how I forgot the Fediverse Observer! I think it's because I have mostly used it for viewing microblogging software, so when I decided to build a threadiverse catalog, my mind only went to indexes specifically for the threadiverse. Adding it now, thanks!

[–] m3t00@catodon.rocks 1 points 6 days ago

https://fedidb.com/ dansup fedi-db. I haven't used it much. no idea about backend/api.