"Buy Me A Coffee"

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I’ll change this but you’ll get a 404 page for links that aren’t on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

    P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you’re seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won’t be any new content.



  • Yep that’s the new idea. The sad part is that with this method there’s no way to get historical data. Only new posts. So if a server goes down, gets DDOSd etc… I’ll lose posts forever.

    Also building an ActivityPub implementation from scratch isn’t trivial either. So that’ll take some time.

    I’ve got a few other ideas I’m playing with as well. Like just assuming that internal post IDs are all sequential and literally fetching them one by one. Or maybe some combination of both?





  • Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I’ll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won’t be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you’d have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there’s nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there’s no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there’s still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.






  • There is a public API now. While I won’t support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.

    When you search for posts you’re just matching against the title or body. For communities it’s searching the posts within that community.

    There’s also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.

    So I’m not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I’d share.





  • I’ve already started to abstract away Lemmy from the search engine itself. So the first steps are in place. Once I get the kinks of the 0.4.x release knocked out then I plan on reading up on Kbin’s API and I’ll start working on the crawler. I can’t promise anything but that should give you a rough timeline.

    If you have any programming skills I could always use a hand.




  • It’s on my to-do list. Sadly though, in order for something to show in the drop-down for home instances that means I must have previously crawled that site. Because my #1 requirement is that if you click a link it must open in your home instance. Good news is, is that Kbin and Lemmy work nearly identical to each other, so Kbin will be the first non-lemmy type of instances that you can search.