I used the federate remote communities page on the web UI, but I could also have typed the ! notation into a comment. I didn’t try using the search to find it, but I don’t think it would have worked. When I used the federation machine two weeks ago, I only grabbed communities over a certain size on certain instances. MULTIVERSE has to be told to look for smaller communities.

Still, communities like femcelmemes and dankchristianmemes and lemmyshitpost (shit is also on the list) were picked up by the community federation machine with no tinkering.

So here’s what the code does. That list you found, of the seven_things_plus, it’s Rimu’s idea of “low effort communities”. As an admin, when I click on a user, I can see their “reputation”, which shows if they’ve been getting lots of downvotes or lots of upvotes. And I also have a checkbox that says something like “ignore reputation from low effort communities”. It’s designed to prevent karma farming. Rimu designed it so if a robot posts a lot of memes to 196 to farm karma and then starts posting ads for RAID SHADOW LEGENDS, I have the option of ignoring the meme reputation and still seeing that the bot isn’t contributing anything of value. But I have the checkbox turned off because I like memes.

This week I’m gonna try making a PR to change that list’s name to something more descriptive and make it configurable by admins. I’ve never contributed to PieFed before so we’ll see if I can understand enough of the code to do it. Wish Me luck.