I have it set up so that a bot user is subscribing, not my user. That way the communities are populated with comments and appear in All if I'm interested in the future, but otherwise I wouldn't see them. It makes my instance feel much more alive.
Also, it's worth noting that you can provide a list of the Lemmy instances in the config. You can be as obscure as you like here.
I think the job of seeking out smaller, more niche communities has to be a manual one.
Memmy is really good. The TestFlight is full but it’s about to get released on the App Store
wefwef is a web app and it’s also really good. You can install it to your home screen and you’d never know it wasn’t a native app.
Mlem has potential but so far it’s got a bit of work to do to catch up to the above two.
You can’t, but you can provide a list of instances and then tell it to subscribe to the top X communities in TopDay, Hot, Active, etc.
So far, not really. Only a few gigs so far, but it’s hard to predict how big it could get.
By the way, Oracle free tier has 200GB of storage for ARM64 systems.
I’m running a very small instance and I highly recommend using LCS:
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Essentially it automatically subscribes to popular communities from other instances on behalf of a user within your instance. That way, when you want to subscribe to a community at some point, it’s quite likely that it will already be full of comments already.
That's interesting, they're two of my biggest interests. I wonder if this is true for a lot of other people.
I loved this app when I used an Android and immediately bought premium. Very sad to see it go.
About $5-$10 per month. I’m using an ARM64 system which make it even cheaper.
I'm hosting my own because it's fun and it's cheap to do it. I imagine it could get expensive to host bigger instances, and at that point the admins would likely look to donations to keep things going.
The problem is that you can't have spaces or capitals. The error message isn't very useful, it tells you to match the requested format but doesn't tell you the format that's being requested.