1 yr. ago • 88%

New Lemmy Server - Get all communities

I have a new Lemmy server (lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me) and I've noticed only communities I subscribe to show up.

The idea was to have my own local instance but I don't see how I can find new communities without using another instance first and finding those communities there and then manually adding them to mine. I have found the following two github projects:

lemmy-subscriber-bot

Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS)

EDIT/NEW:

lemmony

Does it sound right that I will have to use some app like these to be exposed to new communities?

Thanks all!

35 comments

Use a site like browse.feddit.de to find communities you want to join and join them. Every instance only "has" their local communities plus whatever remote communities the users of the instance join. With more users it is more likely someone else has subscribed to something you are interested in, but someone on e.g. lemmy.world had to be the first user there to search and subscribe to any community that isn't based on that instance.

9
- Thanks! I was hoping it would auto-sync and get the newest communities but I understand now how it works. Thank you!
  
  4
- What's interesting about this is that there really isn't an r/All. All@lemmy.world will be different from All@beehaw.org, will be different from All@lemmy.ml, and will be VERY different from All@lemmynsfw.com
  
  3
  
  Yeah, as someone who used Mastodon back in the day this wasn't surprising, as they sorta highlighted your vs local vs public timeline, but I can totally see how it could be confusing expecting Lemmy to just be a "reddit clone". And TBF it is a reddit clone of sorts if you disable federation, "All" is everything your instance can possibly access, but then you lose out on what IMO is the killer feature.
  
  There is probably a way you could spider instances and scrape content to get an "All" of sorts...
  
  4
  
  Yeah, this is kind of disappointing. There's no consistent experience. What I see may be very different from what you see and while that's in itself is not necessarily bad, it makes it hard to discover communities.
  
  I guess it's the price we pay for decentralization and I'm okay with that.
  
  2
That is how it works you have to manually add communities

7
- Thanks! I was hoping it would auto-sync and get the newest communities but I understand now how it works. Thank you!
  
  2
  
  Use lemmyverse.net to find communities across all instances. It will make you search a lot easier, and show you when a community exists on multiple instances
  
  4
  
  If you are self hosting there is a tool on GitHub lcs that will auto subscribe to some communitues for you.
  
  2
I just started running my own instance as well and have similar concerns. Interested in what you wind up doing.

5
- https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
  
  Use this. It is exactly what we both wanted!
  
  3
  
  Just a follow-up thanks for this recommendation. Working great!
  
  2
  
  Awesome! Thanks!!!!
  
  1
I can vouch for community seeder, my personal instance all page looks as populated as my kbin.social account.

4
- That's the one I went with and it certainly seems to work well. Do you just pull the two top categories that are set by default?
  
  2
  
  I added Top Hour. I left the run schedule at 240 minutes but it seems to keep up pretty well. I'm regularly subscribing to new communities from the All tab
  
  2
Lemmy Community Seeder works pretty well. You may want to experiment with which servers you pull from though ( beehaw consistently gave me errors which caused LCS to crash). You can set up a specific account without any admin or moderator privileges if you don't feel comfortable using your personal account (all the account really does is subscribe to the top communities from the servers set in your config). As far as I can tell you only really need to run it once in a while to get an updated list of popular servers.

4
LCS is pretty great but now my database is growing pretty big. To some extent, I guess it's something that will eventually happen anyway. Might as well start early?

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1
- The problem is you lose the ability to encounter new communities by browsing "All". And since I'm the only user on my instance I will never discover any communities that I don't manually add or find on third-party websites not to mention that process of using those websites is cumbersome and tedious...
  
  I added the top few thousand communities and the server runs absolutely fine. :)
  
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