Welcome to NotNotLemmy
You may notice that you can't find every community in the Fediverse using the search: that's normal
Lemmy doesn't download information about other instances unless at least one user in the instance is subscribed to the community. If you search for an instance and don't subscribe, we'll see the posts you found and nothing more, the community updates won't be automatically retrieved, but we'll have a snapshot of the community at that time (unless a moderator purges it). This saves on storage costs and processing power in a big way.
If you want to subscribe to a community not listed, simply determine the URL of the community and enter it into the search box in the following format: [email protected] (note the !)
Then visit the community and click "Subscribe" to add it to our server.
Not sure what communities there are out there? Check out one of these utilities to discover more:
If you find additi
Do you know how much data is put onto the local device when subscribing to all these communities? Ballpark is it in the MBs? GBs?
Trying to determine whether discovering things I don't want is worth it
Yep you're right. And I've discovered that, in order to see posts from a community, at least one user in your instance needs to be subscribed to a community to view it.
Would be nice if someday the browse functionality provided by some sites was integrated into Lemmy but for now I had to go through and manually subscribe to a bunch of things.
I'd use a scraper but there's a lot of content I don't care to see right now, and I'm assuming subscribing comes with a small storage cost, so may as well avoid it for now
New self-hosted instance not crawling communities
Just got my own instance up and running finally, but it doesn't seem to be federating as expected.
I can search for and subscribe to communities, but unless I specifically search for the URL (e.g. [email protected]) nothing shows up. I'm also making this post from my instance as well (to see if anything happens...)
Is this something I just need to wait a few hours to happen or is something incorrect.
Thanks in advance
Edit: Oh, and when I do subscribe to a community, I can only see new posts. It doesn't retrieve older posts