FOSSDLE PieFedLemmy Federate - tool to help communities sync across instances
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m_f
edited
Just found out about this and thought it was neat. For those of you that don't know, a Lemmy instance won't automatically federate everything everywhere all at once. It'll federate only what local users are subscribed to. So someone made a tool that will let you increase visibility of smaller communities that might not be synced to every instance.
Looks like it's opt-in, and instances can avoid using it. Some do because it's a lot of server cost for stuff they don't care about.
I've created a few communities, and wondered why I was immediately getting ~30 subscribers, and this is probably why
Small disclaimer: some instance owners prefer to not enable it due to network and storage consumption: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28227815?scrollToComments=true
Yeah I'm one of those. Not only is there A LOT of data on the fediverse that I would have to pay to host, but there is A LOT of NSFW/nsfl things too. When I come across it I defederate it. It would be a flood of things if I just blindly federated with everyone
Just something of note, the program has options to not federate NSFW content in its settings, so it'll ignore communities and instances marked as such.
That's why it's really important to have an option to share your own instance communities without receiving ones from others. Allows others to know of you, while not taking on more data load than you have to.
I still think it will not explode bandwidth and storage, but I can't argue because I don't have any valid evidence :)
The reason I say this is that communities take up a few bytes in the database and if there is no activity (post/comment), they don't use any bandwidth either.
However, I can't say anything about the organic /all tab argument. It's a matter of preference. Kind of funny one.
If I see a new community or post that I feel should've gained a higher number of subscribers/votes I tend to check if it's been federated or not
and if the community hasn't I tend to queue it up as a habit🤗
i do this also with one of the local bot accounts so new users will find stuff on my instance easier. keeps the the 'all/new' queue churning for superscrollers
Does something like this exist for Mastodon?
Probably wouldn't be well received since for them it's individual people, not communities which you follow. Would be considered botting their profiles. It's different with communities though.
Just I have an experimental instance which isn't federating outward unless I interact with an instance for some reason
Is that not expected behaviour?
Is it?
At least in the Lemmy side of things. Federation isn't automatic.
Not sure, sorry. I don't really use Mastodon all that much, maybe somebody else knows?
This should just be on, at all times, for all instances/communities.
There are some instances which can't handle the load of communities being pulled into them, since it does eat up a lot of storage. It would be good if there were a mode that allows federating an instance's communities outward without pulling in any from other instances.