Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.
I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?
Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?
Yeah, agree. I don't think there are easy answers though. There is a /communities/ url at each instance, which would be a lot more useful if it was populated with the list of all communities the instance federated with. I think think the devs were nervous about that list being too expensive to federate properly, but it doesn't feel to me like it should be a major problem.
Have you found https://browse.feddit.de/ yet? That is the Big List of communities. It's still quite obtuse how you subscribe to them if you're the first on your server to do so... but it's at least a place to look.
There's also (just as of today)
lemmy.directory. This is an instance where somebody is attempting to subscribe to every lemmy community in order to create an /r/all equivalent. So browsing https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1 will show you the firehose of posts from which you might pick out some communities that interest you. And https://lemmy.directory/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 should actually be a complete list of all communities as well, via the native lemmy community browser.These are all suggestions to help you personally, but they don't invalidate your critique that community discovery is like... way too hard. It's true.
Edit: Here's a baller tutorial on community setup and discovery that includes how to subscribe to a remote community that no one else on your instance has found yet: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9162
No sweat, I'm just trying to help people find ways to stick around my making their first days a little less confusing. Because the system overall isn't easy, it helps to have a buddy while you're getting your sea legs. Just trying to be that buddy in the hopes that it makes for a more lively place for me too once people get settled.
Cheers, mate.