I first used lemmy on lemmy.world but due to its size I had several issues of things just not loading and needing a full page refresh. So I tried to set up my own instance and it works mostly but the federation aspect is leaving me with a few questions.

Will remote communities only sync new posts from when I subscribed or will past posts show up eventually?

Is having a single user instance realistic or should I try find another small instance?

  • HorseFD@lemmy.buzzEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Niami@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Looks great, but would this take up a lot of storage? I’m currently running my instance on an oracle free tier micro instance and the storage is 47GB.

      • HorseFD@lemmy.buzzEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • maegul (he/they)English
        2·
        1 year ago

        Ruud, who runs lemmy.world, was asked how much the instance is using, see here: https://lemmy.world/comment/784410

        Basically 30G DB and 60G pictrs for the whole instance for 4 weeks of usage.

        They have 13k communities and 22k active users per month.

      • HorseFD@lemmy.buzzEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • interdimensionalmemeEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          But if everyone does that it will creates a positive feedback cycle where the most popular get more exposure get more popular while the rest gets ignored.

          • HorseFD@lemmy.buzzEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.