Aha, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Thank you!
Community discovery between instances?
I'm on lemmy.world and found myself wanting to create several communities that I thought hadn't been created yet. It took me a while to figure out that communities don't propagate between instances until at least one person has searched for it by full name (with !).
I understand the technical reason for this, but now that lemmy.ml is maxed out and people are being encouraged to use other instances, it makes the lemmiverse feel much smaller than it actually is, because the search field on these smaller instances won't turn up anything that someone else hasn't already started searching.
The best case scenario is that there is a bunch of duplication as people create communities they think are missing. More likely, a lot of people who would otherwise participate will see the sparse community list on their instance and think that means there's nothing for them to see.
Is there something we can do to make communities more discoverable between instances?
Is it possible to do this preemptively as a not-logged-in user on another instance? Or does it have to be a member of the instance?
It seems like we're going to end up with a bunch of copies of the same community if you have to know that a community exists on instance X in order to propogate it to your instance. I just did that with Linguistics.
(If there's a desire to have one here as well, please reply to this post, otherwise I'll delete it in a few days.)
I'm going to get things rolling by posting a few links. Anyone coming here from /r/ProgrammingLanguages is probably already familiar with them, but I'm going to try to get things primed.