this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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There's always going to be people that want to be on a smaller Instance, because it's frankly an objectively superior experience unless you get unlucky with your admin. There's really no major advantages to being on a large Instance. That I know of anyway, and I'm on one.
So, running a smaller Instance is probably always going to soak up some demand, so long as you advertise it a little bit.
One downside that I’ve run into is discovering communities. Your instance only gets updates from communities someone on that instance is subscribed to, so you’ll have to go to other instances to discover them.
My instance uses a seeder script that'll do exactly that, but automated. It'll check the most popular communities on the most popular servers and use an account to subscribe to them.
Boom, /all feed populated.
wav perfect solution
Did you guys make that script or is there a repo for it cause that would be very useful.
There are several scripts working like that. I use lcs (lemmy community seeder). I'm going to switch to something else or make my own, because lcs doesn't handle it well if an instance is overloaded or not available.
Thank you, I saw that yesterday when looking through GitHub and added it to my list of things I wanted to try out. Thanks for your effort! ❤️
Not OP, but I’m using this one: lemmony on GitHub
EDIT: deleted link, I feel like I made a mistake, see below.
Of the 3 subscription bootstrappers listed in this thread, lemmony is by far the worst of them because it subscribes to EVERYTHING by default.
Lcs forces you to pick a number of communities to subscribe to, and the other one has default threshold heuristics that pick a limited number of active communities. Lemmony signs you up for the entire firehose of the threadiverse which both makes instances using it pretty bad fediverse citizens in terms of generating a 50x-100x the federation load of a "normal" single-user instance that subs maybe a hundred communities... and also exposes novice single-user instance owners to legal liability by subbing all the small under-moderated communities full of questionably illegal stuff.
I would recommend one of the better designed tools, and to review the resulting subscription list manually to ensure you're not signing up for some sketchy stuff.
Yeah, I let it run by night and saw what I did today. You are totally right, I will probably need to clean up a few things.
I'm not experienced at cleanup, and I don't think lemmony offers an undo. But if you used an account other than your primary... I think deleting that account will nuke its subs and you can start over. If I'm wrong, this may leave a bunch of orphaned subs with no user and no way to write an api-script to unsub.
In either case, I do recommend doing your automated subs on a different account and viewing them in all rather than directly subbing your main account to all that junk. It definitely give you more options for cleanup.
I created a bot account for this, so all green on that front, will experiment with it, thanks!
Awesome feature. It's great to see you thoughtfully trying to balance the community discovery problem with the federation overhead caused by mass subscription.
While I continue to favor and recommend manual subscription, I've bookmarked lsb and lcs to recommend to folks looking for automated approaches. I think they're looking pretty good right now and seeing you proactively address feedback gives me faith that they'll get even better.
Oh cool, didn’t know that existed. I’ll look into that
You still have the same search capabilities and the same all feed though. Just not a local feed worth anything.