I’m running a standalone Lemmy instance, but I’m not planning to develop or grow a community on said instance since it’s mostly to practice my infra and DevOps skills. I would, however, like to subscribe to all communities on other instances, for example, on lemmy.world and several others. Is there an easy way, or can I only subscribe to each community individually?
If you want to see all of them, you can change the setting from “subscribed” to “all”
The point you’re missing is that Lemmy only federates posts from communities with at least one subscriber from the home instance.
So if you have a single-user personal instance, you won’t see any posts on All except ones from communities you personally subscribe to.
I’m not aware of any method to mass-fetch federations, to answer OP.
No, right now there’s no easy way to do multiple subscriptions at once. Features like that are being discussed heavily right now, but nothing’s been implemented yet.
You can only subscribe to communities individually, and as of this current moment, there is nothing like the “relays” that other Fediverse platforms have to push known instances to your own instance.
The way federation works is that an instance must explicitly search for an ActivityPub compatible instance and then start requesting data from it, there are no central locations that will provide an instance with all of the known Fediverse.
You’ll have to use the search option and hope for good results. The fragmentation of communities seems to be a rising topic these days. While it’s good that posts and comments are fragmented, I think personal feeds should be consolidatable.
I was able to do this pretty easy with Mastadon but am struggling with lemmy. Right now it seems I have to make an account for every instance I want to access. Lemmy.world for example shows “You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world” when I try and add nostupidquestions, but I’m not seeing this search field they are talking about, at least on Mlem and I’m bound to mobile right now
