I was told that I should post this here.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/932750

Say you decide to self-host a Lemmy instance. When you create that instance, do you immediately need to download and store all the data that has ever been posted to all federated Lemmy instances? Or perhaps you only need to download and store everything that is posted to the federated Lemmy instances from that point forward? Or better yet, do you only store what the users on that instance do (i.e. their posts, and posts to the communities hosted on that instance)?

  • @[email protected]English
    13•1 year ago

    I think you’re right. People will gravitate to the most stable large instances because their “All” will be as close to 100% as possible without doing anything special. I wrote a script to seed instances and update subscriptions, but it uses a single account that is subscribed to everything so that other users can see everything. That’s not something that would normally happen. Maybe that needs to be part of the base software?

    • BriongloidEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      Knowing that instances only pull posts/comments that occur after the first subscription, it will become less and less viable to choose a small instance if Lemmy doesn’t add the option of adjustable pull settings.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t suppose your script is published anywhere? My comment adjacent to yours mentions how something like Mastodon’s Relay system would really help solve this issue, and it sounds like what you’ve made is probably the closest thing we’d have to a relay system for a while (given the core devs being super super busy with the existing issues).

      On a side note, I wish there was also a way to set the homepage of an instance to “All” as well (which can be done user-side, but not globally), my instance only has a meta-community for announcements, so I can imagine that it just looks like an absolute ghost town to anyone who stops by.