I left Lemmy to come here to join the fed not too long ago. I went through the setup and joined a bunch of communities. The most active one I spend reading is Selfhosted. Besides that I’m on my home page using the default “hot” and “subscribe” sorts enabled and I see the same thing all day every other day. I see people say it’s not that active and I know this isn’t Reddit with its volume but it can’t be that inactive here. I’ve tried “hot/new” and “all” just it seems to be a bunch of RSS feeds with no human context or interaction. With I’m doing something wrong or the communities I’ve joined aren’t active enough or both.


So, first of all, there are significantly fewer communities and users here on the Threadiverse. However, there is at least one other major factor, as your home instance isn’t a huge one.
The way Lemmy and Mbin and PieFed work, any given home instance—you’re on feddit.online—doesn’t automatically download content from communities created on remote instances. They don’t even know about remote instances.
It only starts downloading posts and comments and such once at least one user on your instance subscribes to that community.
Your All feed won’t show everything on the Threadiverse. There’s lots of stuff that your instance is oblivious to. It’ll only show the posts from communities on instances that it’s downloading posts from.
For a large instance like lemmy.world, this isn’t a huge factor, but for smaller ones, it’s a bigger issue.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
lemmy.world has 13,155 active users.
https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
feddit.online, which is your home instance, has 164 active users. Probably not many people out searching for and subscribing to new communities!
There is a website that crawls all of the Threadiverse and builds up a list of communities on all instances: lemmyverse.net. They have a page that lets you search through and browse the list of communities:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Unfortunately, this page isn’t made obvious to most new users. Oh, and note that the default setting on that page is to not show NSFW—pornographic—communities, if you’re on the hunt for those, but you can flip that on with the checkbox in the upper left.
But if you go there, you can look through the list of all of the communities out there. If you find a community that you like, say, [email protected], you can click on it to copy the text
!photography@lemmy.world, and then search for it using your home instance’s search, and that’ll let your home instance find out about the instance and community if it doesn’t already and if you subscribe to it, it’ll start downloading the content from that instance and show up in the All feed for other users on your home instance.In general, I recommend that people try to build up a subscribed-to list of communities that they are interested in and then browse Subscribed rather than relying on All. All necessarily is only going to show some of the content out there. It can be a way to find new communities, but it’s always going to miss content, and it’s less-effective for that on smaller home instances.
EDIT: There are also two communities that it’s helpful to be aware of if you’re looking for new communities. You might want to subscribe to these:
[email protected]: this has people post when they are creating a new community. The caveat is that all of the communities here are going to be empty when posted, and some may not take off.
[email protected]: This has people post stuff about communities (new or old) to help make them more visible.
In general, I think that lemmyverse.net is a better route than monitoring these communities—much easier to browse a full list of communities—but you might always also get some benefit there, and lemmyverse.net isn’t “part” of the Threadiverse itself, just a convenient search engine/browser, whereas the above two communities are part of the Threadiverse.
There it is, the technical explanation I needed to start understanding what I’ve been missing. Thank you for sharing. I really need to fine tune then.
Sure. Oh, one other thing—some instances explicitly defederate with others. If your home instance has intentionally defederated from another instance, users on that home instance won’t see content from that instance.
On Lemmy and PieFed and I think Mbin instances, you can view a list of defederations (and federated hosts) at /instances. So for your home instance:
https://feddit.online/instances?page=1&search=&filters=blocked
There are also user-level controls that will permit you, as a user, to block content that your home instance knows about. Some other users, other instances. There’s an NSFW tag, and there’s an option to blur content so-tagged, and I think also block it. That could also lead to content not being visible.