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I may be wrong, but while it's annoying to have to add each instance one by one, it's also a feature.
If your instance's users never access those other instances/communities, federating with them will only serve to increase the load on those servers, without any tangible benefits (other than not having to search communities once before accessing them).
If I'm wrong, please someone correct me :)
Not to mention it will increase your instance's storage requirements far beyond what you use. If you take @lackthought's suggestion to use browse.feddit.de, you'll only be pulling in things that you actually use.
lemmy.directory and browse.feddit.de both seem to index all lemmy communities
I’m not sure on the technical details of how they do it but you could try asking around on those instances for some advice
I'm still learning the API, but if you wanted to build your own community crawler, you could do something like this:
/api/v3/site against your own and look at the federated_instances.linked key and query each of those. If your federation list is small, you could call that API endpoint for another instance, such as lemmy.ml or beehaw.org to get theirs.{domain}/api/v3/community/list?type_=Local to get a JSON list of its local communitiesYou probably don't want to crawl and subscribe to every community on every instance. That would cause a lot of unnecessary traffic for both you and the instances you're subscribed to.
To quickly make a remote community "known" to your server, you can massage the Lemmy-UI's search endpoint to make it work a little better.
https://{your-instance-url}/search/q/[!community@domain.tld](/c/community@domain.tld)/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/undefined/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1
Replacing [!community@domain.tld](/c/community@domain.tld) with the remote community address you want. Can be in either [!community@domain.tld](/c/community@domain.tld) or https://domain.tld/c/community formats - both will work. Calling the search page that way will wait until there is a result before rendering rather than showing "no results" and making you click search two or three times until it appears. Same process on the backend, just cleaner in the front.
You can do that through the backend API similarly, but you'd have to put your JWT in an auth URL param which I wouldn't suggest against the instance's public URL.
Dove into the API last night to see how difficult it would be to use the REST API to create something resembling RES for old.reddit.com. That's about as far as I got before life got in the way, so hopefully that's useful for someone.
Wow, just wow. Thanks for the ideas... Guess I need to familiarize/play around a little bit...