this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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Is there a reason why instances couldn't just index and show all the communities from other federated instances?
Right now you have to do this to add a community from another instance:
I don't see why instances couldn't just have an index over communities on all federated instances, so it's a one click action to subscribe to any community in the entire Lemmy fediverse.
If this was implemented it would lower the bar for new users enormously, and encourage a lot more cross instance subscriptions.
Word is Lemmy and kbin are working to make the process more automated, so if you click a link to a community/magazine your instance want aware of it'll start aggregation without having to manually do the search. Downside of going with a free, open source, decentralized solution is there aren't a bunch of devs dedicated to updating the platforms for a living, so features will roll out slower.
Like features just flew out the door for us at Reddit. :)
Yeah, Hopefully they'll be able to something soon. That is ultimately the big downside to decentralized open source solutions but it sure outweighs the drawbacks of the closed source centralized ones as will become painfully apparent on June 12
How would one instance know that I set up a new instance without a central service?
When you subscribe to a community from another instance, it learns your instance exists and starts sending it messages and receives responses.
@jeena @YoTcA @milan @mrmanager user discovery. But generally they don't know.
They can make it so they can request community lists from servers they're actively connecting to, but because of the decentralized nature of things, servers are not automatically connected to other servers. And I don't believe a server even needs to be directly connected to another at all to receive posts and comments from users there if they're routed through a community on a server it is following.
Spinning up a Fediverse server does not inform any other server that it exists, any more than it informs Etsy that it exists.
Not by itself but posting from it does. Lemmy.ml knows about hundreds of small instances because we post from them. :)