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.
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 firefox@lemmy.world, Lemmy Go will take you to lemmy.ml/c/firefox.world.
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
I had never used Waterfox, but I installed it just now, to see why it doesn’t work. Latest Waterfox is apparently based on Firefox 102, which doesn’t support Manifest v3 extensions (and Lemmy Go is one of those). I tried to see if supporting v3 and v2 was feasible, but it’s just too many changes even for a relatively small extension like this one. The changes themselves aren’t too big a deal, but it would mean maintaining and testing two very different versions of the extension (which I already have to do for Firefox vs Chrome, but right now they are almost identical). I’d rather keep the project as simple as possible for now.
I expect Waterfox G6 (which is supposed to release in September) to support Manifest v3 extensions, so maybe we just need to wait a bit.