This is true in theory, but in practice almost no one filters by language because the UX for setting the language is so confusing that almost no one sets the language on their posts… so failing to select “undefined” as a language turns off 90% of your feed.

This is normally a pretty healthy attitude, but I’m not sure it particularly applies in this case because we know there are serious bugs associated with not releasing:

• We’re in the middle of a massive bot registration wave that admins are reporting captchas address.
• The biggest instance, representing 40%+ of the active userbase of the lemmyverse is blocking their upgrade on that feature.
• Jerboa v0.34/0.35 and Lemmy v0.17/0.18 are not cross compatible, leading to many daily confused questions about bug and error messages.
• lemmy.world is also experiencing replication lag that is poorly understood and people think might be addressed by an upgrade, and again this issue affects nearly half the active userbase of the lemmyverse.
• The ONLY feature that needs to be in v0.18.1 is captcha.

Given that we know there are serious ongoing bugs associated delaying the release, and that a release with a very small scope (a single squashed commit) would address those bugs, it’s possible to cherry-pick just the captcha commit, test just that change manually, and craft a release whose reasonable bad-case bugs are considerably better than the delay case.

Obviously it’s possible that the devs are considering priorities I’m not aware of, but I’m tracking a wide array of support channels and find it hard to imagine that a single-fix release is going to leave us in a worse position than we’re in now.

• A new version (v0.18.0) of the Lemmy server was released a couple of days ago, and it changes the API used by apps significantly.
• Your account is on the lemmy.world instance, which hasn’t upgraded yet because the new version is missing an important bot-acount-signup defense feature that is gonna get re-added in a Lemmy patch-release soon. So it’s still running v0.17.
• A new version of Jerboa was released (v0.35) with compatibility for the new version of Lemmy.

If Jerboa is working ok for you, you can ignore the error. It will fix itself “real soon now” when lemmy.world upgrades. If Jerboa is broken you can uninstall it and reinstall v0.34 from https://f-droid.org/en/, https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium, or direct from Jerboa’s GitHub. All of these are a little more complicated than installing from the play store, but not too bad. If you downgrade, be prepared for the opposite message to come soon and you’ll want to upgrade again.

If Jerboa is working ok, I suggest you wait it out.

The local feed shows posts from the communities that were created by a user on your instance, and where the canonical version of that community is hosted on the instance where your account is.

The all feed shows posts from the above, and also from communities that were created by a user on a different instance and where the canonical version of that community is on their instance. They’re shown in your all feed when one or more users on your instance subscribe to them and posts start getting federated from the remote instance to yours for browsing purposes.

On a big general instance like lemmy.world where your account is, the local feed doesn’t feel all that meaningfully different from the all feed. If you had an account on pathfinder.social (an instance that only hosts tabletop roleplaying communities) the local feed would have a very particular flavor. But on lemmy.world, the local feed has bits of everything just like the all feed.

I’ve subscribed to a bunch of communities and I rarely use anything but the subscribed feed. Very occasionally I’ll quick browse through all, pretty much never to I interact with local.

Lemmy.world (where OP’s account is) has a rule 3 stating:

No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories. Moderators have sole discretion to decide if a post violates this rule. Birds are real. The Earth is round. Get over it.

See https://mastodon.world/about (both world servers are maintained by the same admin team, and lemmy.world links to that page for its rules).

Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it’s basically donations… either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.

But to put into context how much money we’re talking about…

• A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you’re talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
• The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That’s not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn’t take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.

Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course… those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.

https://lemmy.ml/c/test is the appropriate community for this kind of thing.

This is the wrong community for this question, it’s an open-ended discussion forum like AskReddit… not a support forum for Lemmy.

That said, check out the v18 API before you start writing a bot. It’s going to change in a big way shortly.

There’s a GitHub ticket at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506, but no tooling yet. You just have to manually copy out of your communities list unless you can figure out the API to dump your communities subs yourself. It obviously possible via the websockets API since the page displays it.

Alright, thank you. It’s not completely satisfying but it’s what i’ve been doing and it works for now. Sometimes I just wanna see what’s the general PoV from a different instance, and i guess just browsing through those instances will have to do for now.

I dig it, this is a reasonable way to cruise around the fediverse sightseeing the vibe on other instances. FWIW, it wouldn’t give you any insight into how I as a lemmy.world user experience things here, as a huge part of my feed is remote communities. But yeah, it’s still interesting to see what’s getting hosted locally.

To switch, my process is… Do you know a way to do this more easily?

I don’t cruise the fediverse much in the way you’re describing, my goto tool is subscription. But I these two things just scrolled across my feed this morning:

• https://lemmy.world/post/48816
• https://lemmy.world/post/48909

I’m not even going to try to summarize what they do because to be honest I’m not sure I understand myself. They seem to have something to do with instance switching though. I wonder if they would help you, or could be modified to do so. I might just be confused and they might be irrelevant though. At any rate, I provide them for your information without endorsement.

I don’t think exactly what you want exists, and I would be surprised if it landed soon. Under the hood, this would require subscribing to all the communities on lemmy.world but then not showing them in your subscribed feed and instead providing some kind of “remote local” or similarly confusing view from sh.itjust.works, which is likely to be pretty hard for folks who already struggle with the mechanics of federation to understand.

Two things you CAN do are:

• Subscribe to the communities that you’re interested in on lemmy.world. Just because the communities are homed here doesn’t mean you can’t subscribe to them. At which point they’ll show up in your subscribed list as posts in a remote community.
• Visit https://lemmy.world/. You won’t be logged in, and can’t comment/vote… but you can browse the full local feed from there. I realize you said this is what you don’t want to do, but I reiterate it because it’s on the short list of things that are closest to what you want to do.

Of these, I’d employ the first. Just sub to whatever communities you find interesting, it doesn’t have to be all of them. And if you want to find new communities that are active, visit the anonymous local feed just to see what communities are hopping that you’re not already a part of. Then sub them to interact from your instance.

It’s very common to have admin teams where different admins have different areas of focus, and in particular to have folks that specialize in community management and different folks that specialize in infra management. I do think it’s common for people to have to pitch in outside their area of expertise in busy times, but generally this structure works and is widely used.

The trick is finder such a partner where you both trust each other. In addition to this post, a couple other ways of finding a partner admin might be:

• Ask good mods in the communities you participate in if they’d like to run an instance together where you each contribute your strengths (their community management and your technical acumen).
• Scan Lemmy support communities for new instance admins who are struggling with a technical question. Help them out with their question, and ask if they are open to adding a systems specialist to their admin team to help their instance weather user growth.

I’d be picky about your partner, though, and thoughtful about how fast you scale up. It’s much easier to scale infrastructure than to scale community management, and very easy to misjudge your willingness and ability to manage a large community if you haven’t done so before. It would be easy to find yourself with a big instance and no community manager if someone gets in over their head and bails due to lack of experience and lack of understanding about how hard and thankless it is to admin a big instance.

But if you ask around enough I’m sure you’ll find someone that would welcome engineering assistance.

This is a discoverability problem that can be solved separately from the duplication “problem” though. Reddit has all the same duplication, there’s /r/tech and /r/technology, there’s /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, there’s suddenly 3 million aita communities. What makes people not sweat this at Reddit is that subreddit search is MUCH MUCH better than Lemmy’s community search. You always find the biggest subreddit first, and there’s no danger of finding only the small/irrelevant community because the big/main one didn’t show up in your search for confusing federation reasons.

If community search was effortless and worked to discover the biggest relevant community irrespective of the server it’s on, I think people would immediately stop caring about community duplication, similar to how it’s rarely cited as a problem on Reddit even though it’s rampant there as well.

I’ll echo the suggestion from another commenter to post future help questions in !lemmy@lemmy.ml. This sub is for asking lemmings about other stuff… analogous to /r/AskReddit/.

But to summarize Lemmy’s search, it’s confusing and primitive.

• It’s confusing because of Federation. Each instance searches its local database, which means equivalent searches from different instances are likely to return different results. Searching a popular community on a well-established instance that has been around a long while will be pretty reliable. But an instance that got started last week is going to be missing a lot of older stuff, and there’s a lot of instances like that. I recommend searching the home instance for the community rather than your home instance as a user. That will ensure that you get the full resultset for that community… though it means searching several communities may require visiting several different instances.
• It’s primitive because it’s “just” postgres search. Most searchboxes we interact with on a day to day basis are backed by extremely sophisticated search infrastructure that has sophisticated relevance ranking that is powered by past searches… the system keeps track of how people search and modifies search results when it sees that a result is popular. Lemmy search is just using a “plain” database search, the approach to ranking is pretty simple, and it has no idea how helpful a result has been in the past. If there are few enough results that you can scroll through them all yourself that doesn’t matter much… but if a search returns hundreds or thousands of results… expect them to be ordered in a not very useful way.

I feel like using an external search engine is probably a better approach, but that’s not super simple either. I haven’t found search strings that I’m totally happy with.

Some random ideas:

• Post it here. Presumably it’s lemmy.villa-straylight.social?
• Search for Lemmy posts about picking an instance and comment about your instance. These are readable from the public internet without a Lemmy account, you just can’t vote/comment without an account. It may feel silly to post on Lemmy about getting a Lemmy account, but it can be useful because they CAN be found and read by people without accounts.
• Post it on other apps/systems where you see people talking/asking about Lemmy.
• Fake your user numbers. Create test1 through test5 accounts on your server to bump your numbers above the join-lemmy.org threshold. It seems to me that the purpose of that threshold is to filter out personal/private instances. If you’re serious about being an admin of a bigger instance and know what that entails… just make the accounts yourself to get above the threshold. You can always delete them later, but also a handful of test accounts with “regular” permissions are likely to be handy as an admin.

Consider reaching out to your instance admins and suggesting that. There’s no central power who can make things happen on every instance, we just all have to coordinate together to increase the reach of good info.

Check this out, it’s a great guide to finding new communities on Lemmy: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827

It includes a link to the community browser, discusses other non-intuitive community discovery tools, and how to subscribe to a remote community when you’re the first on your instance to find it, which is a bit janky as well.

Joined.

Not sure if you play any other systems, but pathfinder.social is a topic-oriented instance with a bunch of pathfinder/starfinder communities that may interest you. Not much traffic yet though.

Edit: In the ttrpg space there’s also:

• !RPG@lemmy.ml
• !Pathfinder2e@lemmy.ml
• !osr@lemmy.ml
• !faterpg@lemmy.ml
• Too many to list on pathfinder.social, but here’s one at least to get people started: !pf2general@pathfinder.social

Also, kbin, I know nearly nothing about it, what’s it about?

It aims to unify the community-ness of Lemmy and the tooty-ness of mastodon in a single app/account. The community bits aim to be quite similar to Lemmy as far as I know. I believe the registered user count was under 2000 earlier this week, though, so it’s MUCH smaller than the Lemmy community and I think a lot of what people use it for is to connect to Lemmy communities. Admittedly, I don’t really know what I’m talking about though. I decided to go with the more established ecosystem in Lemmy and didn’t dig too deep beyond skimming the webpage when I was shopping for a fediverse app/instance.

Details at https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin

You’ve gotten some technical answers, but here’s a bit of context about user-experience:

• From Mastodon…
  • A Lemmy community looks like a mastodon user. You can post to the community by at-mentioning the user. The first line of the toot becomes the post name, the rest of the toot becomes the post body. If you ever see posts with the title @communityname, you can bet that’s a mastodon user who didn’t format their toot in a way that maximizes readability on Lemmy.
  • Existing posts from Lemmy look like toot threads in Mastodon, with each comment as a toot. You can reply to a comment by replying to the toot. Again, if you see a comment beginning with the username being replied to, it’s a decent bet that reply is from a mastodon user.
• From kbin, Lemmy communities look like magazines, I think… and behave pretty much like communities.

Other apps may interoperate differently, or may just feel a bit broken depending on the specifics of how it uses ActivityPub compared to Lemmy.