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.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Still working for me. You might need to clear your browser cache as I did make some UI changes as part of the update.

  • curiosityLynx
    3•1 year ago

    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/[email protected] for me, for example.

    I imagine making kbin instances searchable with your tool would require quite a bit more work.

    • @[email protected]OP
      4•1 year ago

      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.

            • @[email protected]OP
              1•1 year ago

              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.

              • curiosityLynx
                2•1 year ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]OP
                  1•1 year ago

                  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.

              • curiosityLynx
                1•1 year ago

                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.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Ya I index both post titles and the post body. I also weigh the body content slightly higher as well. So posts that just link an article will usually show lower than posts that actually have content.

      At some point though this will change. As eventually I’ll start adding comment data to the index as well. But I’m waiting on a bug in Lemmy itself to be fixed before I begin working on that.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Just pushed a new update, that should fix an issue with the home-instance selector. Since you’re on lemmy.world I’d suggest selecting that instance from the drop-down and trying your search again…

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Seems to work, do you have to choose an instance? When I left it on default it would not work

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Yep. The idea is that the instance you select is the instance that all links will open up in. This way once you find a post you’re looking for you don’t have to find it on your home instance and can immediately start replying, save it for later, subscribe to the community, etc…

          Edit: I do plan on “fixing” this eventually, but I’m waiting on a bugfix on lemmy itself. You can see more here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20