Just found out about this and thought it was neat. For those of you that don’t know, a Lemmy instance won’t automatically federate everything everywhere all at once. It’ll federate only what local users are subscribed to. So someone made a tool that will let you increase visibility of smaller communities that might not be synced to every instance.

Looks like it’s opt-in, and instances can avoid using it. Some do because it’s a lot of server cost for stuff they don’t care about.

I’ve created a few communities, and wondered why I was immediately getting ~30 subscribers, and this is probably why

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      5·
      16 days ago

      Yeah I’m one of those. Not only is there A LOT of data on the fediverse that I would have to pay to host, but there is A LOT of NSFW/nsfl things too. When I come across it I defederate it. It would be a flood of things if I just blindly federated with everyone

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        16 days ago

        Just something of note, the program has options to not federate NSFW content in its settings, so it’ll ignore communities and instances marked as such.

    • iso@lemy.lolEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      I still think it will not explode bandwidth and storage, but I can’t argue because I don’t have any valid evidence :)

      The reason I say this is that communities take up a few bytes in the database and if there is no activity (post/comment), they don’t use any bandwidth either.

      However, I can’t say anything about the organic /all tab argument. It’s a matter of preference. Kind of funny one.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      That’s why it’s really important to have an option to share your own instance communities without receiving ones from others. Allows others to know of you, while not taking on more data load than you have to.

  • recursive_recursion they/them@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    17 days ago

    If I see a new community or post that I feel should’ve gained a higher number of subscribers/votes I tend to check if it’s been federated or not

    and if the community hasn’t I tend to queue it up as a habit🤗

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
      5·
      17 days ago

      i do this also with one of the local bot accounts so new users will find stuff on my instance easier. keeps the the ‘all/new’ queue churning for superscrollers

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      Probably wouldn’t be well received since for them it’s individual people, not communities which you follow. Would be considered botting their profiles. It’s different with communities though.

    • m_f@midwest.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      Not sure, sorry. I don’t really use Mastodon all that much, maybe somebody else knows?

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      There are some instances which can’t handle the load of communities being pulled into them, since it does eat up a lot of storage. It would be good if there were a mode that allows federating an instance’s communities outward without pulling in any from other instances.