Hey, I made a simple webapp, that shows you a random community with basic stats, description and top 10 posts of all time from this community.

You can use it without logging in, but for automatic following, the login is required.

All data is stored in your browser and code is open source.

Some info and issues of the app:

  1. I made it in a day, so bugs may and will happen
  2. It uses a json list of communities from browse.feddit.de
  3. It ignores all NSFW communities. I’m planning on adding a switch for that, but if you really want, you can change nsfwFilter property in local storage through devtools. all is for everything, none is for no NSFW and only is for only NSFW communities.
  4. Sometimes it fails to follow a community. Maybe it’s because community is not yet “synced” to the instance you logged in from. Don’t know much about exact reason, because I’m new to lemmy from the tech side.
  5. There is also a planned feature to exclude whole instances. Currently only possible with editing local storage.

    • Soullioness@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      3 years ago

      Federation is a bit weird sometimes. Edits, deletions, and mod actions don’t always federate very quickly or even at all sometimes.

    • OverfedRaccoon 🦝@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      What’s weird to me is I saw the edit (with the link) on this account, my main account on lemmy.world, when you first posted it, since I clearly followed the link to try it out. I don’t know if all the DDoS stuff messed something up or the admins had to restore from an old backup or something, but that edit with the link isn’t reflecting anymore on my lemmy.world account or my alt at lemm.ee.

    • stirante@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      7·
      3 years ago

      I wanted to focus a single community at once and make a sneak peak of it all which is some numbers, description and top 10 posts. This way it’s less likely to accidentally skip some cool community. Also this shows you random ones and not some type of list so you’re exposed to more niche ones.

      Anyways I think lemmyverse is also cool, just a different approach to discovery of new communities.

  • Malice@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    3 years ago

    This is really nice; I second another person’s opinion that it resembles a stumbleupon just for lemmy. Some kind of “Not Interested” button would be a good idea, though I don’t know how feasible that is.

    At any rate, it’s a really cool tool, and I appreciate your having made it. I’m excited to see if/how it develops.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    3 years ago

    This is really cool. I think why it won’t let you subscribe sometimes is because the smaller subs aren’t acknowledged by your signed in instance yet. You have to search from your signed in instance for that particular community, go to it, and then subscribe. Great tool though, thanks.

  • OverfedRaccoon 🦝@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    3 years ago

    Pretty good. It’s kind of like Stumbleupon for Lemmy communities. The only “issue” I saw is it includes the forbidden no-no instances that are defederated by a lot of the bigger instances for being… troublesome.

      • OverfedRaccoon 🦝@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 years ago

        I honestly don’t know how it should be. I’ll leave that up to you. I wasn’t logged in when I was going through communities. So that might be a way to filter them out easily - if you can pull a list of blocked instances from users’ home instances once they log in.

        • stirante@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
          3·
          3 years ago

          I just pushed an update. If you log in, it will fetch defederated instances from your instance as well as communities you already follow and hide them.

          • OverfedRaccoon 🦝@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 years ago

            That was quick! Logged in and went through a few skips. Not seeing anything worth noting, which is a good thing. I appreciate that it also pulls from smaller instances I’ve never even heard of.

  • Elegast@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 years ago

    Looks neat I’ll check it out. Would be cool if you could login and it would pull your subscribed communities and then come up with similar communities based on already subbed ones. Cheers.

    • stirante@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      3·
      3 years ago

      I’d love to do that, but that would require me having info on all users’ followed communities. Then I could cluster communities based on shared subscribed users and actually recommend communities. Basically if user A follows X, Y and Z, user B follows X, Y and Z and you follow X, then you might be interested in Y and Z.

      Or some simple alternative would be to tag communities, but again someone would have to do it.

  • Mereo@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 years ago

    I think this was much needed, thanks! I used to use Random on Reddit to discover new subreddits.

  • projectmoon@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    Am I missing something? Or is the link to this tool not actually present in the post? I only see a screenshot.