eviltoast.org is now discovering new communities automatically as long as they meet these criteria:

• At least 15 subscribers
• At least 50 20 comments
• At least 50 20 posts

This means any remote community that matches the above criteria should show up when searching for communities.

I’m hoping this will help with discovering useful communities without needing 3rd party tools.

Due to the way lemmy works, the above communities are only “discovered” and we will not start getting federated posts/comments/updates for them until at least one account subscribes to the community.

In addition to the above criteria, any remote communities with over 500 100 active subscribers in the last month will also automatically be followed by a bot account.

These changes are already in place. After a few days, the above numbers might get changed to start pulling in more communities.

https://lemmyverse.net is the source being used for filtering remote communities.

Update 2023-08-06: Reduced the requirements to 20 comments, 20 posts, and 100 active users.

Update 2024-05-15: Started using https://lemmy-federate.com/ as either a potential replacement or at least to supplement this process.