Hello!
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?
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!