this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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You might be surprised at how easy it is to jumpstart the all-communities and all-posts pages. My instance was super new when I joined, and quite dead as few people had subbed to anything yet. I took an hour and hit https://browse.feddit.de/, learned how to join a community from scratch that my server didn't know about yet... and took the all-communities page from half a page long to 2 pages long. Within a day I saw folks subscribing to the same subs I was on, and others subbing stuff I had passed on.
It only took a handful of folks setting up their subs to feel alive. You do want to set up a lot of subs though as many are basically empty.
I have found it to be relatively painless to add and find communities after finding https://browse.feddit.de/ but that's not exactly an obvious route to a more complete all tab.
And while I say relatively painless, I'm sure it would be beyond what many people are willing to do. Even being patient and following the correct order of copying and pasting in the right instances can be cumbersome. I assume it can take a moment to load what is a new federated instance for my instance, but that wait time often feels like there's just nothing there or the link is otherwise broken.
I will say though, even with all these hurdles lemmy has been a great experience! The overall feel of the communities is something I didn't even know I missed. The ui has some obvious learning curve issues, but when it's working I actually like it more than reddit.
My complaints and pain points have all proven to be relatively minor inconveniences for me. However, I worry about how they could cause others to turn around and leave.
I've unfortunately seen the mindset of "that's a feature" floating around, which isn't a welcoming atmosphere. In hyperbolic terms, it reminds me of people wanting help with linux and just getting scoffed at for using anything with a gui.
Why isn't there a script that admins can run to do this automatically? It seems like a no-brainer that you would want all communities to show up in search by default.
It's definitely not a no-brainer to replicate every post/comment in the fediverse to a single-user server where the user is only interested in reading 3 of the communities. That would induce a massive federation/replication overhead both to send and receive posts and comments that no one cares about. Lazy replication that only kicks in when someone asks does admittedly feel weird on a brand new server, where everything is new/empty... but it makes a fair amount of sense if you think about what's going on behind the scenes. I'm sure a person COULD write a script to subscribe the admin or a dummy account to a seed-list of popular communities to get things started, take a crack at it if you want. It's not clear to me that it should be the default though, as this doesn't make sense for single-user or very small instances, they should start empty and decide what they want to subscribe to.
I do think that a useful middle-ground would be to populate the LIST of communities. The all-posts/all-comments feeds really do need to be constrained by what communities people are actually subscribing to. But the number of communities is much smaller, and their rate of creation/change much lower. I think it could be reasonable on federation init to ship the full community list across the wire even on a big server that hosts thousands or tens of thousands of communities, and then eagerly ship community creation/deletion events across the whole fediverse. That seems like it would be a manageable volume of information, it would enable every instance to have a useful /communities/ page from the moment they federate, and it would make subscribing to remote communities much simpler. Right this minute the devs are trying to fast-track performance improvements to keep
lemmy.mlfrom falling over due to the new influx of users though, and that's good/important work to prioritize now.That's what I meant, I think they should make it so that all communities show up by default on the community list page.
Also just so I understand what you're saying, are you saying that I could intentionally sabotage a server just by subscribing to a lot of communities, which would cause the All page to use a ton of resources whenever people look at it?
On a tiny instance with insufficient resources, maybe. But it's not so much a problem for one person to decide to subscribe to a lot of things. It's more that you have to be careful about eagerly shipping useless messages around big federated/distributed networks. Imagine a world where Lemmy is very successful, and a network of 10,000 instances federate with each other but maybe 9000 of those are tiny personal instances. If one of those servers has an unpopular sub, there's a BIG difference between shipping 50 copies of a post made on that sub to the servers with users that care... vs shipping 10k copies to servers where mostly no one cares. Then multiply that by the potentially hundreds or thousands of posts on unpopular subs across the whole network. It's very easy to ship around millions of messages that no one reads. Good federated designs MUST minimize this.
So if you want to intentionally sabotage the network in the way I'm describing... then you'd set up thousands of lemmy servers and configure users on them to subscribe to everything. People would probably refuse to federate with you and the bad thing would never happen... but yeah... thousands of servers could generate a pathological amount of replication load on the servers hosting active communities.
Hmm interesting, thanks for the explanation.