I've been thinking about hosting my own Lemmy instance, but wonder if there's an easy way to federate with other communities/instances. I like to browse the "All" tab, but that tab would be empty on a self-hosted instance I imagine.
Is there a way to get all communities of certain instances in my All feed? Or do I have to search up each individual community manually once?
I don't know how it works on lemmy. But on Pixelfed after you successfully federate with Mastodon.social or any other instances. It will automatically start discovering new instances and federate with them.
Over on Mastodon, there are relays you can sub to to help populate things. I don't think there's any such functionality in this corner of the fediverse yet, but it's surely only a matter of time.
I really wish there was an easy way to export and import a list of communities@domain that you can then transfer to another account. It would make it very easy to just add a bunch of content to a freshly created instance like you're talking about, once you subscribe to communities your instance will start getting updates from them and your "All" tab will get populated.
For now you have to do it manually unfortunately, afaik.
i did that partially. I have a bit user subscribed to many communities. Unfortunately that is a fully manual task - currently i don’t have an automated way of doing this
I don't think there's a way of doing this automatically at the moment.
With Lemmy's API you could set up a bot that takes care of listing all the local communities on a remote server and then searching them from yours, which would make them appear in your search results.
But if you want the publications of this remote community to federate with your server, you need to have a local user subscribed to it.
I'm working on a Rust API wrapper around the existing common API to make it easier to use. Implemented the calls that could let someone do this exact thing at scale last night.
It's nowhere near ready for production and is still missing a lot of basic API functionality even for a simple bot, but I think it'll be ready to publicly release in an alpha state within the next couple days.
Pretty much, that would force federation. Though I don't think users in the other community would see your communities until someone from there searched one of yours.
An idea I have is giving small communities an option to run the bot on their instance, and it would add them to a list. Then, communities voluntarily participating in that list could auto-populate each other's communities through the bot. I could see spammers abusing something like this to try and flood feeds with garbage content until they're defederated though, especially on instances with open registration, so there is a downside. But that's something the community of proper users will need to be prepared to fight down the road.
Yeah, that's a slippery slope. I think that federating to receive content from an instance is fundamentally different than making your content show up on a instance that didn't ask for it. I definitely see the value your implementation would bring to new/single-user instance to populate the feed. Good luck!
I'll keep you in mind when I do that. I've got some free time the next couple days to work on it, so I'm hoping to have something by then. So far the API calls I've implemented are Search, ResolveObject, GetSite, GetFederatedInstances (Though it's basically GetSite), GetPosts, Login, ListCommunities, FollowCommunity
So, you know, pretty far from doing much practical work. But not bad at getting information about an instance. I want to at least have all the basic post/comment/community functionality in before I release anything. Also, I think I want to restructure what I have into a better format. Don't quite like how I set it up.
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