Are you trying to filter known communities by their instance? ~~That is not supported by the Lemmy API, so a client can't do that without depending on some other third party API.~~
~~https://join-lemmy.org/api/main#tag/Miscellaneous/operation/Search~~
edit: A client can do it, but I don't think any client has that feature.
Well then, as others have suggested, you should check out https://lemmyverse.net/
Though you will only be able to search Lemmy communities. Community search for Piefed and Mbin/Kbin is not implemented yet.
Depends on what client you use. Showing all communities (which is what I assume you meant by "channels") of an instance does not require authentication, at least for Lemmy. Which means it is totally possible to implement this feature into the clients.
Communities will not show up in someone's instance if nobody has made the community known to your instance. Someone from your instance DOES NOT need to be subscribed to a community from a remote instance to make it visible for users on your instance. Subscribing only lets your instance receive updates for that community.
These previous ways will only show communities that are already known to the instance. Especially if you joined a small or inactive Lemmy instance, there will be few communities to discover. You can find more communities by browsing different Lemmy instances, or using the Lemmy Explorer. When you found a community that you want to follow, enter its URL (e.g. https://feddit.org/c/main) or the identifier (e.g. !main@feddit.org) into the search field of your own Lemmy instance. Lemmy will then fetch the community from its original instance, and allow you to interact with it. The same method also works to fetch users, posts or comments from other instances.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html#following-communities
One other way that is not mentioned here is by putting the community tag without the ! into your instance's URL after c/. This too will initiate a webfinger request and make the community known. E.g.: https://your-instance.com/c/cats@other-instance.org
Related helpful documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html
I use Aegis on my phone.
3 years? I think it will happen much sooner than that.
I haven't released the source code yet. The private repo at the moment is very messy in general so I am just waiting until I get a somewhat working pre-alpha done with the design that I am still experimenting with finalized. There's still a ton of work to be done since I just started 2 weeks ago.
Yep. I did use those endpoints with the ModeratorView (The bot doesn't need posts or comments from communities it doesn't moderate) on my first attempt. I went with the federation approach at last because of future scalability issues. Though that is probably an exaggeration. If the default rate limit is 180 read requests per minute, that would be more than enough, honestly. The scale at which the scalability issues I mentioned would appear at about more than 4500 comments/posts per minute. Frankly, I think we'll never reach that in the near future. So actually the rate limiting issue is practically not an issue for the foreseeable future.
The plugin system would work. The fetching problem would disappear.
Though I don't think the federation code would be huge. I am not trying to make it compatible with all platforms. For example I'll write the required Lemmy ActivityPub structs to send moderation related activities and actors. The Group's instance would handle distributing the activities, so even though this project might not federate with Piefed for example, it would still receive the activities the bot sends to the Group's inbox through the instance's software, Lemmy.
If someone wanted to get the bot to work on another Ap platform that supports groups, they would have to write the necessary Ap actors, activities, and a bit of glue code, and that would be it... or at least that's how I'm planning it.
I guess I'll try to work with the plugin system if I can't achieve what I want and keep it simple. It would at least be a learning experience, if nothing else. Thank you for the info.
I took a look at this yesterday and the first thing I saw was zcash advertisement.
Also, I can't seem to find the source code anywhere in the website. Is this another proprietary Reddit clone?
Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn't care about scalability.
However, the API was not good enough for my use case. Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues. You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.
They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who's going to give you database access? So you'd have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I'd imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.
Another solution would be using Lemmy's new webhook system, but I don't know how reliable it will be.
So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:
With federation, the problems above would be solved. This also allows it to be hosted without having to find an instance for it or even self host it yourself.
If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn't be possible. Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn't, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.
Not really answering your question, but I'd like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.
The platform should provide some of these out of the box, in my opinion.
I am trying to build a new activitypub powered platform just for user scriptable moderation bots, but I am stuck on the modular federation design.
This is my third attempt now.
best game ever made. just take my money
See my edit. It is possible, but the client needs to implement it.
If you think it would be useful, open a feature request in your client's repository. It can be done by getting the list of all the communities in your instance and searching by instance domain.