this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I didn’t realize this until I started self-hosting my own instance, but if you don’t join one of the 3 large instances (beehaw, world, ml) then you miss out on a LOT of historical content. The way federation works is that it only pulls in new post/comments after someone on your instance subscribes to a community on another instance. So if you find a cool new community on another instance, you can subscribe to see any new posts and comments, but you won’t see any of the old content at all unless you manually search for the post/comment.
Long winded way of saying, the best user experience (content wise) is always going to be on the largest instances unless Lemmy/ActivityPub changes how content backfilling works.
Or at the very least, it's proof that the best time to start a new Lemmy instance for yourself is now instead of later 😉
The best thing an admin can do is either subscribe to all the major instances before users pour in or ask the earliest members to do so. Just makes search and timeline stuff a bunch easier on folks new to federation
It also means that your server load / storage needs blow up with the more users you have.