I have a new Lemmy server (lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me) and I’ve noticed only communities I subscribe to show up.
The idea was to have my own local instance but I don’t see how I can find new communities without using another instance first and finding those communities there and then manually adding them to mine. I have found the following two github projects:
EDIT/NEW:
Does it sound right that I will have to use some app like these to be exposed to new communities?
Thanks all!
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I just started running my own instance as well and have similar concerns. Interested in what you wind up doing.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Use this. It is exactly what we both wanted!
Awesome! Thanks!!!
Just a follow-up thanks for this recommendation. Working great!
https://github.com/jheidecker/lemmony
This one is really nice too. I created an issue with the developer to try to limit it to the top most active communities just to not get 7,000. :D
Use a site like browse.feddit.de to find communities you want to join and join them. Every instance only “has” their local communities plus whatever remote communities the users of the instance join. With more users it is more likely someone else has subscribed to something you are interested in, but someone on e.g. lemmy.world had to be the first user there to search and subscribe to any community that isn’t based on that instance.
What’s interesting about this is that there really isn’t an r/All. All@lemmy.world will be different from All@beehaw.org, will be different from All@lemmy.ml, and will be VERY different from All@lemmynsfw.com
Yeah, this is kind of disappointing. There’s no consistent experience. What I see may be very different from what you see and while that’s in itself is not necessarily bad, it makes it hard to discover communities.
I guess it’s the price we pay for decentralization and I’m okay with that.
Yeah, as someone who used Mastodon back in the day this wasn’t surprising, as they sorta highlighted your vs local vs public timeline, but I can totally see how it could be confusing expecting Lemmy to just be a “reddit clone”. And TBF it is a reddit clone of sorts if you disable federation, “All” is everything your instance can possibly access, but then you lose out on what IMO is the killer feature.
There is probably a way you could spider instances and scrape content to get an “All” of sorts…
but then you lose out on what IMO is the killer feature.
Which is what?
Federation, haha.
Thanks! I was hoping it would auto-sync and get the newest communities but I understand now how it works. Thank you!
That is how it works you have to manually add communities
Thanks! I was hoping it would auto-sync and get the newest communities but I understand now how it works. Thank you!
If you are self hosting there is a tool on GitHub lcs that will auto subscribe to some communitues for you.
I linked two that I found in the topic but if you have any others let me know!
It’s not another one per say but a list that I find really helpful for community Lemmy projects: Awesome Lemmy
Use lemmyverse.net to find communities across all instances. It will make you search a lot easier, and show you when a community exists on multiple instances
Lemmy Community Seeder works pretty well. You may want to experiment with which servers you pull from though ( beehaw consistently gave me errors which caused LCS to crash). You can set up a specific account without any admin or moderator privileges if you don’t feel comfortable using your personal account (all the account really does is subscribe to the top communities from the servers set in your config). As far as I can tell you only really need to run it once in a while to get an updated list of popular servers.
I can vouch for community seeder, my personal instance all page looks as populated as my kbin.social account.
That’s the one I went with and it certainly seems to work well. Do you just pull the two top categories that are set by default?
I added
Top Hour. I left the run schedule at 240 minutes but it seems to keep up pretty well. I’m regularly subscribing to new communities from theAlltabDo we get rid of the space so that it shows as TopHour?
Yes, sorry. I have
COMMUNITY_SORT_METHODS: '[ "TopAll", "TopDay", "TopHour" ]'Thank you for the help!
Developer of LSB here, no you do not have to use apps like these. They just make it easier to pre-seed communities and even subscribe to them. You could also manually add and subscribe to communities yourself by looking them up on aggregator websites like https://lemmyverse.net. If your personal server is not beefy enough, I certainly can’t recommend using the mentioned tools to subscribe to hundreds of communities out there.
The problem is you lose the ability to encounter new communities by browsing “All”. And since I’m the only user on my instance I will never discover any communities that I don’t manually add or find on third-party websites not to mention that process of using those websites is cumbersome and tedious…
I added the top few thousand communities and the server runs absolutely fine. :)
Yes, that is definitely a drawback and the main motivation behind my tool. Once Lemmy has a easy way to preseed communities, then tools like mine would be made obsolete. Till then, it’s pretty much the only way for personal/small instances to get any good number of communities preseeded on their instances.
And it worked perfectly! Thank you for that work!
LCS is pretty great but now my database is growing pretty big. To some extent, I guess it’s something that will eventually happen anyway. Might as well start early?
