Hello all!
I’m the proud owner of a selfhosted Lemmy server, Yay :-) and I wondered if it wouldn’t be a good ides to somehow gather a list of small instances so that we can add them to our “Allowed Instances” list EDIT: DO NOT DO THIS!! It will Break Federation, see below!, and them to add ours (mine has no real users yet).
The reason is that so everyone doesn’t need to flock to the big ones only, and help that rare niche community getting some rare exposure so maybe you’ll stumble onto it one day when filtering by New. Today they don’t get any at all I guess.
In my memory, Reddit was like that back in the day when it was good, real enthusiasts (and a lot more for sure) but hard to come by. You’d stumble on some weird sub about nanotech or fountainpens and meet likeminded people.
What do you think?
EDIT
DO NOT add anything to the “Allowed instances” as it will stop federation with any other instance!
To be perfectly clear, if you add lemmy.abc.com to the Allowed instances, your server will only federate with lemmy.abc.com. Ask me how I know :-)
So that’s not good. Maybe we could set up a user_nice account on our servers, for those who want to, and sub to small subs reciprocally.
I think you’re able to “force” your own communities to be federated to a big server, simply by going to that server and searching for a community from your server – i.e. if the concern is that you might start a community on a tiny server, and no one might ever see it, I think that (a) deliberately federating it to a few of the mainstream servers and (b) posting it to those “New Communities” communities might do a lot to help.