This is a service to help communities propagate to other instances and help with discovery of communities. So far tested and working with PieFed & Lemmy Instances - I suspect it should work with Mbin, but need to test it (Any Mbin Instance volunteers?)
Anyone is free to add their community to the list, but only admins can add their instance to receive communities.
This tool is designed to be simple to use, not requiring fiddling with your instances DNS unlike Lemmy-Federate. Verification for authority to register your instance is done via a message that checks to see if the person confirming is an admin account. It also back-propagates, so on joining your instance will subscribe to all previously added rather than only new ones going forward.
This is my first time launching a service like this, and as such it may not work flawlessly - please share any feedback or suggestions.
Boosted to help visibility, even if a little.
Also, there’s Friendica and NodeBB among the “threadiverse”, though the latter I’m not very familiar with so Idk if it allows importing communities.
Friendica and NodeBB
And Hubzilla and (streams) and Forte. All from the same family. Although there has yet to be someone to start a group on Forte.
Tested recently also adding to the federator some Peertube channel as they’re treated as communitues here and on Lemmy, and it works too. =O
Creator of Lemmy Federate here (not the main maintainer anymore, handed over to lemmy.world management). The reason I switched to DNS-based authentication is that not all software has messaging capabilities.
For example, WordPress doesn’t have messaging. Guppe uses a different messaging infrastructure based on Mastodon. Custom hobby software doesn’t have it either (blogs like chrastecky.dev). I’m not sure about messaging capabilities of NodeBB and Friendica but DNS-based authentication makes Lemmy Federate support all types of federated software that implements FEP-1b12: group federation.
For example, although Lemmy Federate currently doesn’t have any code specifically for Piefed, it does have Piefed support and 10 instances are already registered.
Oh wow I didn’t know Lemmy-Federate shared WordPress blogs and other software. That’s really cool. How does that look like on Lemmy? Is the community the blogs name or something?
It’s like a community. They present categories as AP Groups. This way, categories can be viewed as a community on Lemmy. For example:
https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
Other than DNS login, how does this differ from lemmy federate?
My number one concern is that now there are two services providing what appears to be the same service, some instances will use one of them, some will use another. That could harm community discovery unless we sign up to both.
Is there, for example, better piefed support?
Signing up for both causes no harm and provides redundancy.
This one offers adding communities through the Threadiverse via messaging the bot. Meaning it can be used completely independently of ever visiting the site straight from your app of choice.
It also has a PieFed plugin (thanks to the wonder @[email protected]) in the works that will auto add new comms on any instance running the plugin to the database. Just waiting for a hook to be merged into a future PF update before that can be finalised.
Very cool project!
Thanks Blaze - would love it if you could recommend it to any instance admins you know. The more instances who participate the better discoverability for new communities to grow.
Very cool project and MULTIVERSE is subscribed to it. Hoping to see some cool new communities!
It could use a bit more explanation on what I’m registering for in the signup. Am I signing up for your instance? Do you need credentials for a bot account on my instance? If so, what exactly will it be doing?
Thanks, I’ll work on that part tonight.
Basically you’re signing up your instance (adding a bot or generic user account that will be used to subscribe to the comms shared), and you add your admin username (no other information) so that it can be verified that an instance admin is the one initiating this procedure.
The bot credentials are so that it can subscribe to communities shared on Threadirator and help them federate to other instances, as discovery of new communities is not automatic requiring at least one account on an instance to manually visit/join it before it will start appearing in feeds.
That makes sense to me then. My worry as a tiny instance owner, is that I’m worried I’ll get flooded with requests, that’s a lot of traffic I’d be signing up for. Larger DBs, more ingress, any thoughts on that?
More communities could mean an increase in traffic, but realistically I feel 90% of Threadiverse communities get 2-3 posts before dying off. Very few remain active or grow big enough to see any impact on performance.
It’s not advisable for people running personal instances, or people running small friend instances for those reasons. The same is true of lemmy-federate if you were to join that.
Whoaa cool!!
