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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[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You may also want to support groups on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Fair warnings ahead: First of all, there is no central index for them whatsoever. You'll probably have to find a way to crawl them.

Also, crawling anything on (streams) is difficult. It officially and intentionally does not have a name (not even kidding here). It's the only Fediverse server application that doesn't even come with a default server identifier. A Lemmy server always identifies as "lemmy". A (streams) server rarely identifies as "streams", only when the admin explicitly and intentionally makes it identify as "streams". Otherwise, it has identifiers all over the place, usually automatically derived from the server name.

What makes crawling (streams) even harder is that almost all nodeinfo code has been removed from (streams) on purpose. It's also being kept away from all Fediverse stats and listing pages like The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and FediIndex on purpose.

Forte does have an official name and branding. However, AFAIK Forte still offers the possibility to change the server identifier to something else than "forte". Also, while it does have nodeinfo, Forte's nodeinfo doesn't send any stats AFAIK, only zeroes for everything.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 2 points 6 days ago

Thank you! Yes, I have already investigated these options and rejected automatic detection for them for the reasons you mention. Anyone can still suggest specific communities manually, through the suggestion form.