I first used lemmy on lemmy.world but due to its size I had several issues of things just not loading and needing a full page refresh. So I tried to set up my own instance and it works mostly but the federation aspect is leaving me with a few questions.
Will remote communities only sync new posts from when I subscribed or will past posts show up eventually?
Is having a single user instance realistic or should I try find another small instance?
I’m running a very small instance and I highly recommend using LCS:
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Essentially it automatically subscribes to popular communities from other instances on behalf of a user within your instance. That way, when you want to subscribe to a community at some point, it’s quite likely that it will already be full of comments already.
Looks great, but would this take up a lot of storage? I’m currently running my instance on an oracle free tier micro instance and the storage is 47GB.
Ruud, who runs lemmy.world, was asked how much the instance is using, see here: https://lemmy.world/comment/784410
Basically 30G DB and 60G pictrs for the whole instance for 4 weeks of usage.
They have 13k communities and 22k active users per month.
So far, not really. Only a few gigs so far, but it’s hard to predict how big it could get.
By the way, Oracle free tier has 200GB of storage for ARM64 systems.
How can I make it subscribe, to every community, on every instance, every day?
You can’t, but you can provide a list of instances and then tell it to subscribe to the top X communities in TopDay, Hot, Active, etc.
But if everyone does that it will creates a positive feedback cycle where the most popular get more exposure get more popular while the rest gets ignored.
I have it set up so that a bot user is subscribing, not my user. That way the communities are populated with comments and appear in All if I’m interested in the future, but otherwise I wouldn’t see them. It makes my instance feel much more alive.
Also, it’s worth noting that you can provide a list of the Lemmy instances in the config. You can be as obscure as you like here.
I think the job of seeking out smaller, more niche communities has to be a manual one.
Is there a way to query an instance a list of all its communities ?
Is there a way to query an instance a list of all its communities ?