Show HN: I collected 70k online communities – semantic search to find your niche

3 giulioco 2 8/10/2025, 4:36:51 PM pluggo.ai ↗
I built a social listening agent (yes, like everyone and their grandma). along the way though I realized one of the most useful parts was just finding the right communities. so I started saving them and now i have ~70k.

then I added semantic search so you can find communities by meaning. the dataset grows as people use the platform.

how it works

- free accounts: semantic search the already saved 70k communities - paid accounts: search realtime first (keyword searches from the sources) and then run semantic search over the updated communities dataset

I also put together an agent that given a website finds relevant communities for it. example: https://www.pluggo.ai/sites/bloodtrack_au

right now it covers:

- subreddits - x communities - linkedin groups - facebook groups - discord servers - mastodon servers

next, I'd love to figure out a way to add slack workspaces but I haven't figured out a good way besides a crawler that goes around to find slack invite links? if you know a reliable source, I’m all ears

any suggestions for what other sources I should add?

Comments (2)

jll29 · 1h ago
I'm interested in this from a research point of view.

How do you define a community? I'm guessing you just use the technical "meeting place" in cyberspace as defining the boundaries plus a topic, say people who like fishing, people who have a particular sexual or political orientation, or people that believe in a particular religion; is that correct?

How do you _name_ communities? "Vegans in Austin, TX", "kids that love LEGO", "Pentecostal Christians on Reddit from r/evangelical", "East Coast independent voters" or "Global spicy Thai food connoisseurs"?.

There could be real value add by bringing people from the same community together (= aggregating) that are scattered across different online places.

giulioco · 1h ago
yes, you're correct — in this case however, the platforms themselves do most of the work to define what a community is for them (some platforms, like bluesky, don't have the concept of communities _yet_) - I just collect them...

in general though, the goal of this tool is the one you're describing: aggregating communities that have the same topic/niche across different platforms