Is it bad Lemmy etiquette to “pollute” the All feed of a niche instance?

mookulator@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 58 points –

I heard that the All feed aggregates content from all communities that instance members have subscribed to, meaning if I subscribe to a new community, it’ll start showing up in everyone else’s All feed.

Let’s suppose I have an account on an instance with a particular thematic focus. Should I avoid subscribing to communities outside of that theme, in order to preserve the purity of their All feed?

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Not quite, the All feed shows you all posts from all communities subscribed to on your instance. If there isn't a user subscribed, it isn't pushed to that instance.

So that one subscription is effectively how 'my' instance becomes aware any specific community off-instance, in order to check for posts there?

That both makes sense and is rather counterintuitive at the same time.

I think it becomes pretty intuitive if you can hold in your mind the model of each instance as a totally separate, independent website with no inherent ties to any other.

The problem is, everything here kind of vaguely looks like a place we're used to being a single website, and each instance looks more or less like each other, so that sense of independence and difference is lost. But if you think of it like, I don't know, Facebook or something like that having the possibility of communicating with mydumbwebsite.com, it becomes a lot clearer that that communication needs to be initiated somehow.

It is indeed. Main consequence of this is that if you join a new or small instance, you will see less of the fediverse without actively seeking it

How can I see all feeds on all instances while not being subscribed?

EDIT: pleas disregard. I read the sticky. You must manually search for unknown communities.

If you are on a popular instance where everyone else has subscribed to other instances you might get lucky!