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?
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
Yes, it is, might have a look at this, I don’t think is too hard to make
You probably don’t want to do this. Just sub to all the communities you want in your self hosted instance. Remember that you can browse communities from different instances on your home instance. My understanding about the default behavior of lemmy and most federated apps is that instances will federate to new instances that request them to by default. Unless your instance is actively being blocked from another instance, it should work. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
Wouldn’t this result in absolutely massive demands on local storage?
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.
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.
This sounds like a great idea
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!
I’ll keep you in mind when I do that. I’ve got some free time the next couple days to work on it, so I’m hoping to have something by then. So far the API calls I’ve implemented are
Search, ResolveObject, GetSite, GetFederatedInstances (Though it's basically GetSite), GetPosts, Login, ListCommunities, FollowCommunitySo, you know, pretty far from doing much practical work. But not bad at getting information about an instance. I want to at least have all the basic post/comment/community functionality in before I release anything. Also, I think I want to restructure what I have into a better format. Don’t quite like how I set it up.
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.
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!
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
I’ll give it a shot :) If I manage to make something useful I’ll share it
I also run a self hosted instance so I would be interested in a bot that stays subscribed to communities I want “synced” into my instance without me also being subscribed
I’d like something like this too, if you get somewhere please let me know!
My first thought was also to make a bot that does this, give it a list of servers and it subscribes to all communities on those servers.
Perhaps a subscriber limit, not subscribing to communities with less than X users might be useful. Not sure if that’s necessary though.
Haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I think the Lemmy API has everything needed to do that. If you want a second pair of eyes on the code, reach out!
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.
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
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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.
That’s exactly what happen in my personal instance.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Hopefully someone knows a solution.
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.
