this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023

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I made a Firefox extension for more easily navigating to Lemmy communities from the browser address bar (addons.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 [email protected], Lemmy Go will take you to lemmy.ml/c/[email protected].

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

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Awesome - simple and it does what it needs to, no fuss.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That is such a great idea! Thanks for sharing, will give it a try.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you expand on that? What do you mean by communities on the main page? I want to provide different ways to sort the communities.

Also, feel free to open issues on GitHub with suggestions and bug reports.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah no worries. That's the kind of thing you can fix by just adjusting CSS. Learning a bit of CSS is really useful for that reason.

I had a quick look, and one easy way to do what you want is using an extension like Stylus, and then creating a new style with this CSS:

@-moz-document domain("lemmy.world") {
    #sidebarContainer {
        display: flex;
        flex-direction: column-reverse;
    }
}

Just keep in mind that there's a good chance this will stop working if the Lemmy frontend updates.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy Go will search its database for any community that has the text firefox in its name (e.g. linux_gaming) or title (Linux Gaming).

Is this an typing error or am i misunderstanding something?
If i write lg firefox why would linux gaming show up?
But cool add-on non the less. I'm looking forward to trying it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

woops, lemme fix that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

*Lemmy fix that.

Cool extension! Thank you

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. 😁

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That makes so much more sense. Thanks for explaining!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Using the lc keyword to find Firefox communities on Lemmy

Your screenshot and the alt text mention 'lc' not 'lg' as well. Neat add-on but some time spent actually reviewing what you're publishing would well spent.