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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Run my own instance. @Candelestine@lemmy.world is right but there are more details. Federation is not a "sync." When your instance needs to fetch from another instance it will, but it does not get history. You can get a specific comment or post from any time however.
This is not by default either. Only communities that your users subscribe to will be updated by their "origin" instances.
This does happen, but it also stores what your users do on remote instances as well as "copies" of what they interact with. Images (currently the only media hosted by lemmy servers) are linked to thier "origin" as well. So you are storing text of posts and comments.
So let’s say I’m on lemm.ee and I decide that I want to see “All.” Does that mean I’m only seeing what other users on lemm.ee are subscribed to?
That is exactly what that means and it's frustrating to say the least, because it's not clear that's what's happening.
I’m not really sure how this is supposed to work long-term, then. I can’t imagine anyone wants to be on an instance with only a fraction of the content available. It makes perfect sense when subscribing, but surfing All loses its appeal. I understand the challenges, but I hope there’s a creative solution at some point. It seems like folks will gravitate to the instances with the most stability and users.
I think you're right. People will gravitate to the most stable large instances because their "All" will be as close to 100% as possible without doing anything special. I wrote a script to seed instances and update subscriptions, but it uses a single account that is subscribed to everything so that other users can see everything. That's not something that would normally happen. Maybe that needs to be part of the base software?
Knowing that instances only pull posts/comments that occur after the first subscription, it will become less and less viable to choose a small instance if Lemmy doesn't add the option of adjustable pull settings.
Have you got a link to that script? I want to seed my local private instance!
https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony
I don't suppose your script is published anywhere? My comment adjacent to yours mentions how something like Mastodon's Relay system would really help solve this issue, and it sounds like what you've made is probably the closest thing we'd have to a relay system for a while (given the core devs being super super busy with the existing issues).
On a side note, I wish there was also a way to set the homepage of an instance to "All" as well (which can be done user-side, but not globally), my instance only has a meta-community for announcements, so I can imagine that it just looks like an absolute ghost town to anyone who stops by.
https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony
That's cool, thanks i'll check it out. I also found https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
That‘s so helpful, thank you for sharing it with us! One question: If I want to update my known communities in a month or so, can I just rerun the script or will that cause issues?
You should be able to rerun it anytime. It only gets stuff that doesn’t exist on your instance. That’s how it was designed. It is dependent on browse.feddit.de however. :(
It'd be really cool if we had something similar to Mastodon's "Relays" where you basically subscribe to a firehose of posts from everyone whose on a server connected to that relay (they show up in the "Federated Timeline").
I don't know exactly how this would work for Lemmy, but it seems like if we had a system like this it could really help tackle this issue.
I think there is already some software that fetches content but it's early in development.
Just so I am understanding the feeds...
Subscribed - just the stuff you are subscribed to
Local - just the stuff in your instance
All - the stuff you subscribe to, the stuff in your instance, and stuff that people in your instance follow from other instances
That correct?
Correct. All also includes communities fetched but not subscribed to, however these are more like stubs. They are in your database but not being updated with activity since no one is subscribed. At least that’s my understanding.
Thanks for the info!
Would you say it makes sense to have accounts on the 2-3 instances that you're most interested in rather than 2 account and being dependent on federation?
There's no general answer, it depends on your personal preference.
If you want to have most content available, register on an instance which has an according policy; which federates with anybody and is federated by everybody (both directions can make a difference).
The downside however is, this also opens the door to all sorts of bad actors, including bots and spam.
So I personally tried to strike a balance and am so far quite happy on lemm.ee.
This tool is pretty handy to make informed decisions: https://fba.ryona.agency/ It allows you to check federation status both ways.
Thanks for that link. Really interesting.
Yes this was unclear to me until I set up my own instance is may be a big deal breaker to the average user. If you can't view "All" and really see all communities on all federated instances then there is no ability to surf Lemmy. At the very least it should have all communities of instances from either a list or user subscriptions.
edit: if you can share your script that would be amazing, I was thinking of having to do the same thing...