Community discovery on self hosted Lemmy instances
About three weeks ago, I started my own Lemmy instance. It’s been running great, but theres something that keeps pulling me back to my account on one of the large instances.
I like to spend my time on Lemmy scrolling “All”, which I think is a pretty common thing. However, on my instance where I am the only user, the only communities that show in “All” are the ones I’ve manually searched for and subscribed. Yes, I could go through all the popular communities on the large instances and manually subscribe to all of them, but that would be tedious. Also, If a new community got popular, I would never know it existed unless I checked a larger instance that already has it federated. Has anyone had a similar experience? I wish that when you subscribed to a community, all communities on its host instance would federate.
I use Lemmy Community Seeder. Every four hours it checks the top posts on instances you specifies and automatically subscribes you to communities that appear there but you aren't already subscribed to. You can tweak it to ignore specific communities or instances.
That's amazing! I'm gonna set it up on my instance
Keep in mind that you're going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.
We're talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.
True dat. I've been running it about seven weeks and am pulling about 700 communities. Most have near zero traffic but the high volume ones do add up.
And you are adding to the overload of lemmy.world, beehaw, lemmy.ml, etc who have all the popular content communities. Federation has a lot of overhead, as does having to distribute a community one vote at a time to 500 subscribed servers.
I subscribe to !newcommunities@lemmy.world which helps. Other than that I look for mentions of other communities in comments, similar to how I used to on reddit.
Also !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
This is really great, it's basically the same effect as what OP is doing when browsing c/All on a large instance, except you can do it on a small instance and without using an insane amount of system resources on your server
There was a lot of advice handed out back in June that the answer to scaling Lemmy was to go create instances. The reason it works is because "All" is empty on a virgin system ;) With no data in the database, the logic Lemmy hands to PostgreSQL works real fast ;)