Hello all!
I'm the proud owner of a selfhosted Lemmy server, Yay :-) and I wondered if it wouldn't be a good ides to somehow gather a list of small instances so that we can add them to our "Allowed Instances" list EDIT: DO NOT DO THIS!! It will Break Federation, see below!, and them to add ours (mine has no real users yet).
The reason is that so everyone doesn't need to flock to the big ones only, and help that rare niche community getting some rare exposure so maybe you'll stumble onto it one day when filtering by New. Today they don't get any at all I guess.
In my memory, Reddit was like that back in the day when it was good, real enthusiasts (and a lot more for sure) but hard to come by. You'd stumble on some weird sub about nanotech or fountainpens and meet likeminded people.
What do you think?
EDIT
DO NOT add anything to the "Allowed instances" as it will stop federation with any other instance!
To be perfectly clear, if you add lemmy.abc.com to the Allowed instances, your server will only federate with lemmy.abc.com. Ask me how I know :-)
So that's not good. Maybe we could set up a user_nice account on our servers, for those who want to, and sub to small subs reciprocally.
I ask this partly as a question and partly to start a discussion I hope educates me on these details. I host a small instance too and definitely want to know these things better.
Is it necessary to add an instance to the allowed list? If federation is enabled, isn’t an instance ’allowed’ by default? Wouldn’t subscribing to communities on the small instances be of better benefit?
Thanks to anyone who understands the mechanics at play here and is willing to break it down.
Your understanding is correct, and making your "allowed" list non-empty is a big deal because it implicitly defederates you with every instance that isn't in that list. I rather suspect that OP doesn't understand what the allowed list does and is trying to find ways to promote small Instances while lacking knowledge about how things work.
Defederating from all major instances would almost certainly relegate small instances doing so to irrelevance.
That was my intuition, based mostly on the typical behavior of allow/block lists generally. Thank you.
As I understand it, the best way to promote small instances is to have users from other instances subscribe and contribute. This makes the communities visible on the subscribers instance so more people will see it.
Even small instances have to have something interesting enough to attract subscribers, there’s no substitute for interesting content.
OP, I understand and endorse the desire to help elevate the smaller instances, so it’s a worthwhile discussion the post has stimulated. Thanks!