Today as I was searching for interesting communities to join I suddenly became saddened as I remembered this app that I spent hours using. StumbleUpon. When it was young it was the app I spent the most time on waiting between classes. just finding something interesting was always worth it.
The app is not what it used to be. I went to stumbleupon.com just to see and its all corporate. I'm sad because I kinda want StumbleUpon for the fediverse. Maybe I don't want to search for hours looking for communities to join, mastodon users to follow, or pixelfed instances that may have great photos. Maybe I want StumbleUpon for the Fediverse. I could connect it with any federated account, stumble upon something interesting, and subscribe. How could we go about building that?
I'm intrigued and in a position to build something like this.
Let's talk details. So there's ~2k Lemmy servers right now, probably like the top 100 are worth looking at. I can connect to any server and list communities and non-nsfw posts (regardless of if you have an account there). I can use their search box or use any of their sorting methods, and I could exclude anything from communities you're a part of, but I can't just pull something out randomly
So I could go to a server, grab the top local post for the day that links somewhere, I could pick a random community by hot or active, I could look for a library that will give me keywords to search and give you a list of sorted results across many servers
I guess I could also find how many communities they have, pick a random number, and check if that one has more than 5 users (if not, reroll)