v0.0.4 - Per requests and concerns: Defaults changed and options added to prevent overloading servers, hitting rate-limiting, filtering to top x communities, etc!
During the weekend all my communities jumped to 20-30 subscribers, but no participation. I went to see if almost all of the new subscribers were some variation of this bot.
I mean it is not doing anything wrong, it just feels like a huge letdown to see that none of the growth was organic. Are people really creating instances just for the sake of lurking around? What is the point?
This is a cool idea. I was curious how subs work and it makes a lot more sense to me now that I’ve spent the time getting my instance setup and read a ton of docs. It feels weird trying to build your list and communities on your own account, while it also populates your instance’s All list. Feels like all of my interests are just out there flapping in the breeze lmao.
I actually wrote it with the flip side of your centralization argument in mind. If a community exists outside of the popular ones a user may never even know of its existence. Having more show up SHOULD be better to prevent centralization no? It requires the users to change their browsing behaviour but at least they don’t have gonsearching offsite.
Hosting an instance myself, I’m not amused, because if forces my instance to literally sync all content there is on the lemmyverse, drastically increasing traffic, storage use etc.
Please don’t force resource consumption beyond any rational usage!
People can defederate from an instance for any reason they want, but if I get what you’re trying to say: you think people should defederate from any instance that has a user that subscribes to all of their communities.
It increases load during execution. Afterward it’s not significant. My instance is heavily instrumented and monitored. The load this incurs subscribing to 24000 communities is less than adding a single, moderately active user to your instance.
It’s a huge miss if the intended design was to silo information.
What this provides, as far as I’m concerned, is essential to prevent centralization to a few instances.
Is there a better way to do it inherently in Lemmy itself? Probably, and I am excited to help with that!
Uhh… if your script is subbing to 24k remote communities, those will continue to grow from then on, unless you start purging communities at some point. After one user subscribes to a community, all new content gets indexed and stored on your instance. Pict-rs can cache images short term (and eventually clear them out), but Postgres will start growing very quickly and never slow down until it fills up disks.
The script gets all of the publicly federated communities and “makes them known” to your local instance and then subscribes to them. “All” should be populated with activity from around the Lemmyverse.
Doesn’t that significantly increase the load on your instance and, if many instances use it, all instances? This system isn’t designed with the idea that each instance receives everything from every other instance.
It might be better to run this on a single dedicated site which people can come to to browse. If you could learn where each user had their account, you could send their upvotes, downvotes and comments to that instance.
It increases load during execution. Afterward it’s not significant. My instance is heavily instrumented and monitored. The load this incurs subscribing to 24000 communities is less than adding a single, moderately active user to your instance.
It’s a huge miss if the intended design was to silo information.
What this provides, as far as I’m concerned, is essential to prevent centralization to a few instances.
Is there a better way to do it inherently in Lemmy itself? Probably, and I am excited to help with that!
Well that sounds quite reasonable then. It definitely answers a need for better discoverability of material on Lemmy. And it would be great if something like this could ultimately be integrated into Lemmy itself.
I think your idea is on the right track when thinking longer term and assuming the worst case in both design and admin behavior. :)
The whole network needs to be split into “active” and “archive.” New activity (or at the very least stubs to where new activity is happening) needs to be updated regardless of where it occurs without having to capture anything extra.
A clean up would be nice, maybe something where if there are no subscribers, or local user actions on a community (votes, comments) after a while it starts to remove them.
When I discovered, I felt bad for not checking. As for the load stuff. I intended and wanted to see All the things, and I don’t currently have resource problems for my instance. :) We’ll see how that fairs as things continue to grow!
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