Over on Mastodon, there are relays you can sub to to help populate things. I don't think there's any such functionality in this corner of the fediverse yet, but it's surely only a matter of time.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I've been wondering the same thing. Hopefully someone knows a solution.
Only three options for now:
- Subscribed: only what you subscribed to
- Local: that instance only, empty if there isn’t a single community
- All: shows all the federated
So all should be showing all from my understanding
That's exactly what happen in my personal instance.
Subscribed and All will show the same for a selfhosted single instance, as 'All' will only show communities, that someone on the server is subscribed to. Which is only those of yourself if you are the only person on the server.
How do 3rd party hosted instances show more than subscriptions in the all tab?
I would say in that case they have multiple users, then the tab will show all topics that any of them is subscribed to. It will also show topics that were subscribed to in the past or searched for I think.
You have to search them up at least once so they fill some posts, but if you want comments somebody from your instance has to be actively subscribed:
There are directories of all the fediverse like https://browse.feddit.de/ that can help you discover easier.
Could you in theory just have a bot user that subs to all known instances?
i did that partially. I have a bit user subscribed to many communities. Unfortunately that is a fully manual task - currently i don’t have an automated way of doing this
I don't think there's a way of doing this automatically at the moment.
With Lemmy's API you could set up a bot that takes care of listing all the local communities on a remote server and then searching them from yours, which would make them appear in your search results.
But if you want the publications of this remote community to federate with your server, you need to have a local user subscribed to it.
I'm working on a Rust API wrapper around the existing common API to make it easier to use. Implemented the calls that could let someone do this exact thing at scale last night.
It's nowhere near ready for production and is still missing a lot of basic API functionality even for a simple bot, but I think it'll be ready to publicly release in an alpha state within the next couple days.
If you do happen to release an alpha publicly, please do be sure to post it somewhere here - I'd love to take a look at it!
That's neat. Is the idea that the bot user would enumerate and then subscribe to the communities found through the Lemmy API?
Pretty much, that would force federation. Though I don't think users in the other community would see your communities until someone from there searched one of yours.
An idea I have is giving small communities an option to run the bot on their instance, and it would add them to a list. Then, communities voluntarily participating in that list could auto-populate each other's communities through the bot. I could see spammers abusing something like this to try and flood feeds with garbage content until they're defederated though, especially on instances with open registration, so there is a downside. But that's something the community of proper users will need to be prepared to fight down the road.
Ah, so someone needs to be actually subscribed to a community for their content to show up in All?
Alright I guess I'll have to write a simple Bot that can do that for me then
If you're comfortable with Python, you can try this out: Lemmy.py
I'll give it a shot :) If I manage to make something useful I'll share it
I'd like something like this too, if you get somewhere please let me know!
Also wishing for an easier way to do this, manually subscribed to many to help populate our small instance.
I really wish there was an easy way to export and import a list of communities@domain that you can then transfer to another account. It would make it very easy to just add a bunch of content to a freshly created instance like you're talking about, once you subscribe to communities your instance will start getting updates from them and your "All" tab will get populated.
For now you have to do it manually unfortunately, afaik.