No, because Lemmy-federate is only supposed to be used as a “first subscriber” for a community.

Yes, I know but any communities/instances created after that are still in the undiscoverable situation

It only works for Piefed because for Lemmy the problem is solved by Lemmy-federate.

This is part of my complaint! Every service has to have its own solution. And each of these solutions is a centralized dependency for that service.

No, Lemmy-federate is targeted for community mods, not regular users looking for content. Regular users can just use the search bar or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca to find communities.

As a user, I still routinely can not find communities I’m looking for. I’m still not understanding how lemmy-federate “solves” the problem of community discovery, but it’s clear that it doesn’t do it reliably.

That’s not how it works, lemmy-federate is something an instance admin enrolls in and it preemptively connects to new communities on other instances. The individual user doesn’t have to do anything, provided their instance is signed up for lemmy-federate.

The admin signs up for lemmy-federate and lemmy-federate then pulls in all communities from that instance into lemmy-federate, right? Is the admin’s instance subscribed to lemmy-federate and pulling in all the communities lemmy-federate knows about? The site says it uses bots to follow the communities. That seems to imply the admin has to host the bot on their own instance in order to get the communities to federate over to their instance.

and it could absolutely be said that this type of functionality should maybe not be delegated to third-party software

I don’t even think its necessarily an issue that its third-party software (though building it into the actual instances would be better). The main issue is it’s a one-off, centralized service. If lemmy-federate goes down, we’re back to square one. If we want to avoid that, we have to have other relays; but now to avoid duplicating work these relays have to implement lemmy-federate’s API so fedivese software doesn’t have to deal with multiple relay APIs. We could have been using ActivityPub for relays from the beginning, but they’re always an afterthought and nobody is interested in standardizing them. The fediverse was using relays before ActivityPub, then mastodon made new relays for ActivityPub once they realized the discoverability problem (it seems like they were never advertised/used widely because discovery is still a problem on microblogging platforms), and now the threadiverse is making its own relays instead of extending the existing ones, and none of the relays work across the microblogging/forum boundary

A user doesn’t have to, instances nowadays automatically add new communities to lemmy-federate

But that doesn’t matter to a new user who doesn’t know about lemmy-federate. They probably won’t be able to immediately find users/posts/communities they want to see and will have to go through that process

The Piefed post is literally the Piefed devs addressing that issue.

Which, as I noted, I couldn’t reach (yay fediverse). I can access the second link and that’s cool, but it’s relying on a separate service and only works for PieFed. This doesn’t solve the problem.

All of these “solutions” are band-aids that fix small parts of the problem for particular services/instances and rely on a centralized external service.

https://piefed.social/post/531611 is a 404 for me and https://lemmy-federate.com/ can’t find the community I posted in, but even ignoring that, two external services don’t solve the problem. A user shouldn’t have to start a new acct, flail around trying to find others, make a post complaining about it, and then be told about these other services they’re supposed to use.

I rarely use mastodon anymore but I haven’t heard of any new features that improve discoverability. Discovery across the entire fediverse is still awful and it seems like fediverse developers are still content to ignore it and let external developers try to handle it.

In case you dont know, theres https://sepiasearch.org/

Thank you!