this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@PriorProject

I think that’s almost inevitable. Almost all mid-sized lemmy instances will have a copy of almost all mid-sized lemmy communities.

Lemmy is a very different beast compared to mastodon. Of course not everyone is following everyone on mastodon, but if you have an even slightly diverse userbase, they’ll subscribe to a lot of different communities and your instance will have a lot of traffic very quickly. Hosting lemmy is going to be challenging.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is a very different beast compared to mastodon.

Yeah, this is an interesting point. I'm inclined to think that there will be niche communities that in aggregate make a bunch of posts, and that most servers might not have a subscriber for. But yeah, every medium size server is going to have to fetch every big community. Big machines can sling a lot of text, but maybe it does get wild and selective replication doesn't help.