I recently setup a new Lemmy instance and was surprised when my feed was mostly empty. I've since learned that a key part of Lemmy's federation is based on a user from your instance subscribing to communities on other instances. Only then, will your instance pull in posts from the subscribed community to your "All" feed.
This means that subscribing to new communities is especially important if you're on a young Lemmy instance since it helps to build out everyone's feed on that instance.
I've found discovering new communities to subscribe to on other instances can be difficult. To help me search for new communities I may be interested in, I tried aggregating as much of the Lemmy fediverse together into a single feed by subscribing to the widest range of Lemmy communities possible. This offers a Lemmy feed that's kind of like reddit.com/r/all. If it's interesting to anyone else, you can find the instance here: https://lemmy.directory.
Hopefully this offers another way to find new communities to subscribe to on other instances.
Here's a better description of my understanding on how Lemmy federates communities and why you might be interested in checking out lemmy.directory: https://lemmy.directory/post/34207.
Hope this helps ease the orientation to how Lemmy federation and communities work.
Thanks for the tip, I updated the link! And I'll work on drafting some more text about the implications of subscribing to everything.
The rate a small instance would need to send off copies would be tied to the frequency of posts to the community, right? I'm interested in aggregating the lemmyverse, but wouldn't want to overburden other instances in doing so. Although, honestly, I'm more worried about overburdening my own trying. Were you suggesting that it might be rude to subscribe to a community just for discoverability?
So far the hosting requirements seem moderate, although I'd image if more people browse the feed the CPU and database reads will spike. I'll keep an eye on them. I'm not sure if this project is feasible/needed yet, but I thought it might be interesting to try. And if ever help, then I'd imagine during the start of a bunch of new instances.
Hey there... do you not have sign-ups enabled on Lemmy.directory?
I believe it would be
frequency_of_posts * number_of_instances_with_users_that_subscribe. Accounting of course for the idea that lots of small niche communities could... in aggregate... still be a lot of posts even if individually they aren't that busy.No, I don't think you're likely to cause problems for other servers and I think it's a cool project. But "why is it so hard to discover communities" in lemmy is a common theme that armchair federated protocol designers try to solve on their first day after signing up for lemmy. New users might see your instance, and start pestering devs to say...
You already have such a nice and nearly comprehensive explanation of what you're doing. My suggestion is that it might be even nicer to anticipate this misguided extrapolation of your work and discuss why lemmy limits federation by default, why what you're doing is a bit different, and why even though it's reasonable for an instance or two to do mass discovery like this... it's almost certainly a bad idea for the entire network to behave that way.