About three weeks ago, I started my own Lemmy instance. It’s been running great, but theres something that keeps pulling me back to my account on one of the large instances.
I like to spend my time on Lemmy scrolling “All”, which I think is a pretty common thing. However, on my instance where I am the only user, the only communities that show in “All” are the ones I’ve manually searched for and subscribed. Yes, I could go through all the popular communities on the large instances and manually subscribe to all of them, but that would be tedious. Also, If a new community got popular, I would never know it existed unless I checked a larger instance that already has it federated. Has anyone had a similar experience? I wish that when you subscribed to a community, all communities on its host instance would federate.
Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.
We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.
And you are adding to the overload of lemmy.world, beehaw, lemmy.ml, etc who have all the popular content communities. Federation has a lot of overhead, as does having to distribute a community one vote at a time to 500 subscribed servers.
True dat. I’ve been running it about seven weeks and am pulling about 700 communities. Most have near zero traffic but the high volume ones do add up.