Honestly. I was setup and subscribed to some initial communities within 2 hours of RIF going down. Literally my only complaint at this point is the relative lack of content.

[–] sixfold@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

One reason this happens if you made your account on a small instance is that your instance just isn’t federating with very many communities. If you’re the first from your instance to subscribe to a community, try this: Use an explorer like lemmyverse.net to find new communities, copy the url into your home instance’s search field, and it should appear in the results after a few seconds or a refresh. Click the search result and subscribe from there. From then on, that instance will populate everyone’s ‘All’ tab on your home instance with posts from that community, and ‘Subscribed’ if you remain subscribed

[–] Darkraisisi@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Could you explain this a bit more or link to some info? Im new here too, I thought the whole point was that different instances communicated which communities where hosted through them so It wouldn't matter what instance you have your account with and you will be able to see the different communities from different instances. And to get some jargon right, that intercommunication between instances is the fediverse.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

The point is your instance doesn't automatically pull every community in existence, it pulls from communities someone on your instance has already ubscribed to. So yes, you can subscribe to any community*, but you may need to be the first to actually find said community and subscribe no one else has.

When I browse my all feed I see posts from every community that anyone has ever subscribed to on my instance. But if I find one I like elsewhere I can be the first to manually connect (copy paste link) then more people can discover it since I basically added it to their "all" feed too.

Less confusing than I made it sound, and as the user base grows most of the big interesting communities will have been found and federated on instances with decent userbases.

[–] orientalsniper@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

You got it right, sometimes there's even communities with the same name on different instances.

[–] hschen@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool

[–] sixfold@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I know you can "boost" on kbin which will refederate it out. I think? Does lemmy have something similar?

What if you link me a post from before my instance federated with the community?

[–] hschen@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Im not sure what kbins boost does or if theyre even the same as lemmy regarding this problem.

You could forcefully pull posts and comments into your instance by copying their original link and pasting it into your instances search, it will then federate to your instance after a few seconds but doing that for every post and comment would be stupid unless the admins cam somehow automate it

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (25 replies)