One of the main problems with Lemmy on a small instance in my experience is that you can only see communities that other members of the instance have subscribed to. However, other members of the instance will never be able to evaluate any new communities to potentially subscribe to without going way out of their way to find them by fully navigating to other instances, or by using something like Lemmy Explorer, both of which require intentional effort and are not very efficient.
Is there a good way to break this cyclical stagnation? As far as I understand, Lemmy Community Seeder can be run on a schedule to take the top communities from the past 24h from the larger instances, which will help naturally seed bigger communities onto this instance. Any other ideas for how to help counteract this problem?
This is a bit off topic, but yiffit.net hides all their NSFW feeds by default. However, when browsing “all” I’ve been able to see a couple NSFW posts from a couple communities every now and then. Is this because a member of pawb.social has subscribed? And wouldn’t that mean that if someone subscribed to all yiffit.net communities on an instance, it becomes public to that instance anyway? Sorry if this isn’t relevant enough to the discussion, just trying to figure out how federation manages visible communities.
From the amount of random users downvoting and commenting on Yiffit’s NSFW communities I think you’ve got it correct, but I’m not sure.