this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Some have community seeding bots that pull top communities and posts periodically from other instances.
That makes sense, thanks for explaining. I couldn't find a lot of instances in their search though either. Can the instance person make it so they have to approve each instance or something? This is a very simple one and I can't believe they would be defederated.
My instance has it. It's local communities are focused on a specific niche (books & writing) so it might not be your cup of tea though. But basically when setting it up you specify which instances it pulls from, how often it pulls and how many communities it can pull at a time. You can filter specific communities and instances, and it'll automatically ignore instances you've already defederated from. By default it pulls the top /all posts from the instances you specify. Mine pulls from a couple big instances and smaller niche instances as well every day around noon to get a solid diverse amount of content. You can also auto disable NSFW communities from populating as well. It's basically the equivalent of telling the bot to go to the front page of each instance, seeing the top posts of the day and pulling from each community that's there to check if it's federated into your instance or not and if it isn't itll pull it in for you.
With the way lemmy functions if a problematic community starts hitting /all an instance admin can just remove the community and it won't federate into the instance anymore. Ideally there would be more granular federation options in the future, but with the things that the seeding bot does now it works pretty well.
That is great information, thank you for explaining it to me. That explains why I've had issues trying to find my favorite communities on the smaller instances. I think it's misleading when they say that you can pick any instance then, it really matters for what kind of admin you get and what you can see overall. I can't see world on this super small instance but I can see beehaw. On world, I can't see beehaw but I can see everything else the small instance can't. I'm starting to see why people are confused when they join if they join a small instance.
Some of it is also federating content in, you don't need an admin to do so for you. If you have a link to a different instances community, just pasting it into the search bar of your local instance will federate the community into your instance for you. Go to lemmyverse.net and find a community and its link then past it into the search of your local lemmy instance
I did that, that's what I mean where it wouldn't work. I've done it for tons of communities from world where they didn't have it but it didn't work on this small instance.
Really? You sometimes have to click the search button a few times.
I tried 3 different ways and three different times for the search way thinking it was me. It has me confused too, my guess is that the admin didn't want world clogging up their all page so they bounced it or something.
Lemmy.world sometimes has federation issues and wont federate communities into the instance if its down. They've been experiencing a lot of downtime lately.