Today we learned about Lemmy Explorer, a Lemmy instance and community search tool. It uses a crawler to collect information from Lemmy Fediverse servers, scanning each server once every 12 hours. With this tool you can sort your searches by more criteria than the community search at feddit.de:

• Subscriber Count
• Active User Count
• Post Count
• Comment Count

The default sorting method is called “Smart Sort,” which we haven’t been able to find documentation about yet.

A quick search for an Apple community yields strange results. !apple@lemmy.ml shows up first when sorted by posts, but !selfsovereignid@exploding-heads.com is the second search result, which merely mentions Apple Wallet in their sidebar and has nothing to do with Apple. Sixth on the list is !destiny@lemmy.world, which doesn’t even mention Apple anywhere – sidebar or otherwise.

Right now it looks like this is another way to see Lemmy servers and communities, but probably not the best method to compare them to each other and find the right community for you. For now let’s call it another arrow in the quiver, but not the best search tool.