Only able to see subscribed communities
glowie@h4x0r.host to 
Hello! A new self-hoster of lemmy instance. I've confirmed fedi is working and able to return json result for my server.
However, I am only able to find users and/or communities if I manually search for them.
Is there some sort of propagation or sync that needs to occur in order for searched queries to correctly populate data from the fediverse? Cheers
Lemmy only starts the federation process once a user subscribes to it. I think there are scripts to preload some popular ones though.
Ah interesting, thanks. I'll see if I can find some. That makes sense that it relies entirely upon the users of the instance and what they search/subscribe to. So, as a single-user instance, it'd only show what I venture out to find. Hopefully, the scripts you speak of can help automate some of that.
There is a tool I've heard about that subscribes to remote communities for federation until a real subscription. https://boost.lemy.lol/
Seems maybe that tool is a bit different? If you have a new community, you can use that tool to submit it. Rather than the opposite I'm looking for, where it lets me find new communities I'm not yet subscribed to (directly within my homeserver search).
From the way I read it, you create a user for the tool so when you submit your instance, it can run on your instance. One of the users chosen at random is here https://discuss.tchncs.de/u/communityboost
You can read a discussion about it here https://pawb.social/post/4136386
I also came across https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Edit: Looks like https://sh.itjust.works/u/iso might be the user behind it.
Hell yea. The LCS tool is working beautifully. Thanks for that!
Glad it worked. It looks like its for getting the big stuff while communityboost is designed to help find the small.
Seems the only caveat to doing this is that now my instance is growing about ~2GB per day lmao
Might need to find a way to prune the storage or else this won't be financially maintainable hah
No, lemmy currently does not implement any kind of syncing unsubscribed communities (but there should be an issue about cross instance search somewhere)
Though there is 3rd party script thst acts as an user of your instance and subscribes to multiple communities.
On the off chance you aren't using it already, lemmyverse.net is a decent, relatively instance-agnostic way to discover new communities.
Nice, that's a great explorer. Looks like I've got quite a lot of indexing to do.