Populating self-hosted Lemmy instance (feddit.de)

submitted 3 years ago by Lauchmelder@feddit.de to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hello!

I've been thinking about hosting my own Lemmy instance, but wonder if there's an easy way to federate with other communities/instances. I like to browse the "All" tab, but that tab would be empty on a self-hosted instance I imagine.

Is there a way to get all communities of certain instances in my All feed? Or do I have to search up each individual community manually once?

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[-] eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws 17 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] dill@lemmy.one 6 points 3 years ago

Could you in theory just have a bot user that subs to all known instances?

[-] mirisbowring@lemmy.primboard.de 8 points 3 years ago

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

[-] lixus98@kbin.social 3 points 3 years ago

Yes, it is, might have a look at this, I don't think is too hard to make

[+] retiolus@lemmy.cat 13 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[deleted]

[-] Jamie@jamie.moe 13 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 2 points 3 years ago

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!

[-] degrix@hqueue.dev 2 points 3 years ago

This sounds like a great idea

[-] curioushom@lemmy.one 2 points 3 years ago

That's neat. Is the idea that the bot user would enumerate and then subscribe to the communities found through the Lemmy API?

[-] Jamie@jamie.moe 2 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] curioushom@lemmy.one 1 points 3 years ago

Yeah, that's a slippery slope. I think that federating to receive content from an instance is fundamentally different than making your content show up on a instance that didn't ask for it. I definitely see the value your implementation would bring to new/single-user instance to populate the feed. Good luck!

[-] Lauchmelder@feddit.de 7 points 3 years ago

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

[-] Xiphorang@kbin.social 11 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] administrator@lemmy.pro 8 points 3 years ago

Also wishing for an easier way to do this, manually subscribed to many to help populate our small instance.

[-] Kaldo@kbin.social 7 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] stown@lmy.rndmm.us 5 points 3 years ago

I've been wondering the same thing. Hopefully someone knows a solution.

[-] hikarulsi@lemmy.world 5 points 3 years ago

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

[-] burgersc12@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 years ago

All will only show the federated instances, he would have to manually search and subscribe if he wanted to see anything iirc

[-] raphael@lemmy.mira.pm 8 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

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.

[-] Belgdore@lemm.ee 1 points 3 years ago

How do 3rd party hosted instances show more than subscriptions in the all tab?

[-] raphael@lemmy.mira.pm 5 points 3 years ago

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.

[-] redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com 4 points 3 years ago

That's exactly what happen in my personal instance.

[-] mitexleo@kbin.social 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I don't know how it works on lemmy. But on Pixelfed after you successfully federate with Mastodon.social or any other instances. It will automatically start discovering new instances and federate with them.

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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023

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