tl;dr: With Lemmy Go you type lg beekeeping on the address bar and it takes you to the most popular beekeeping community, or you can pick one from the given suggestions.
Get Lemmy Go for Firefox
Get Lemmy Go for Chrome
More information about Lemmy Go on GitHub
Why
On Reddit, I had a simple search keyword for navigating directly to subreddits, where I could just type r firefox and be taken to reddit.com/r/firefox.
I wanted to have the same behavior for Lemmy, but the Fediverse makes this a lot more complicated.
So I made Lemmy Go to try and make it as simple as possible to jump to a community, or even find new ones more easily.
It's still a work in progress, so it might be a bit unstable and missing a bunch of features. But I've been using it myself for a few days, and it's already pretty helpful.
Usage
Type lg followed by a space (some browsers also accept tab instead), and then type the name of the community you're looking for.
Example: lg linux
Lemmy Go will search its database for any community that has the text linux in its name (e.g. linux_gaming) or title (Linux Gaming).
If you just type a community name and press enter, Lemmy Go will take you to the most popular community from that list.
If you don't press enter right away, you will be shown a list of communities that match that query. You can then select the specific one you want.
Preferred Instance
If you set your preferred instance in the user settings (click the extension icon), Lemmy Go will try its best to navigate to that community in your preferred instance, although this isn't always possible (in which case Lemmy Go will just navigate to the remote instance instead).
For instance, if your preferred instance is set to lemmy.ml and you select firefox@lemmy.world, Lemmy Go will take you to lemmy.ml/c/firefox@lemmy.world.
But if lemmy.ml blocks the lemmy.world instance, then Lemmy Go will take you to lemmy.world/c/firefox instead.
Read the readme on GitHub for more information about how Lemmy Go works
Awesome.
I couldn't seem to find any info on the github, so i'll just ask you here.
How is the database populated? Will it be possible to add missing communities manually?
This is where the data comes from: https://github.com/Raicuparta/lemmy-community-crawler There's currently no way to add missing communities manually, but I'll add it to the todo list. But of course if you link any instance to one of the instances that this database crawls, eventually it will show up in the list.
Okay cool. I'll have a closer look at the code at some point.
I might absolutely be wrong as i know nothing about making extensions. But from my short glimpse at it, it looks like it just crawls ~300 named instances from a list and adds up to 50 communities from each to the database. And that it does so as often as you've set it to run.
If i'm right (and i'm probably not), wouldn't that drastically limit the capabilities of the extension?
Or are those named instances basically carying all of the fediverse?
I know you might be the wrong person to ask as you just adapted the crawler, i'm just curious and like poking my nose in to places it doesn't belong. 😁
It's 50 communities per page. It gets every community from every instance linked by one of the instances in the list. So just linking some instance to lemmy.ml or lemmy.world will eventually make it show up in this database.
That makes so much more sense. Thanks for explaining!