this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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FYI for any fellow lemmy admins here - you can enroll your instance into lemmy-federate.com with a bot account that you make which will do much the same. It will subscribe to new and unknown (to your instance) communities and share your communities to everyone else's instances!
Edit: apparently this also supports PieFed too!
It's subtly different though. This is essentially providing an auto-complete to community searching, whether your instance already has a copy of the community or not. It would work even for a brand-new instance that hadn't subscribed to anything yet.
What that bot is doing isn't necessarily a good thing (if no real person is subscribed to something, then all the traffic is just pollution). 3rd party hacks can't compete with actually-integrated features.
It provides a better user experience by far though.
When you're the first on your instance to subscribe to a foreign lemmy community, your instance only gets 10 posts and no comments or vote info. So you get a nearly useless empty sub that will start filling in from that point as people post new things. Especially frustrating if you were looking for or were linked to a specific thread.
With this solution your content was already there, waiting for you. And also searches on your instance will return posts and comments from that community greatly increasing discoverability.
PieFed also has an equivalent of lemmy-federate for mass subscribing, built into the admin area.
Nice!
Fair enough. I guess it's up to individual admins to assess whether the pros outweigh the cons for that bot.