Is there a way to shop around for a Lemmy instance based on how many instances are blocking it and how many instances it’s blocking? For example, I noticed that the lemmygrad.ml instance is relatively popular, but it seems like a lot of other instances block it. It also blocks a bunch of other instances. So, if there are any communities on there that might be relevant to me then I would be missing out. I guess I could just create an account on a walled instance, but I would prefer not to keep creating accounts. I’d like to just find one instance that maximizes my access. Is the answer to just run my own instance?
AFAIK, yes, the answer to have control on which instances are blocked is to run your own instance, that’s actually what I did.
For a way to search the number of instances that block certain instance, I don’t think there’s something like that yet.
If you turn your server off does that make your communities and account history invisible until you turn it back on?
I think each instance has a copy of the posts and comments.
For example this post in my instance is https://lemmy.pe1uca.dev/post/834
But the original one is https://lemmy.one/post/22814
And then in the instance the community is hosted is https://lemmy.ml/post/1159362
You can see the ids are different, so if lemmy.one goes down each instance already has a copy (except the images).
What will probably fail are the interactions, the original instance won’t have the new comments and votes. I’m not sure how it works after it comes back online.
I’m assuming that what you’ve got is a small personal instance. Does it have any trouble getting content from other instances?
Yes, it’s a small instance I’m only intending to use it myself, maybe some other friends later.
I’m doing it in a VPS with 1 core, 1GB RAM and 25GB SSD (it’s the smallest one).
The only problem I had was because the documentation is a bit outdated, after fixing a single configuration everything has been smooth, I can easily subscribe to any community from any other instance and I can interact no problem.
You still have the issue that you only get comments made or updated after initially subscribing? Like the first time you go to a community all the posts have no comments, and you only get new ones after that point.
I’m thinking about maybe making a bot user that automatically subscribes to every community it can find just so I can have everything synced.
Yeah, this is expected behaviour. The feed that grabs the last 20 posts doesn’t include comments, so you’ll only get comments from that moment on.
I understand you can’t just go asking servers to send you every comment ever in its history all at once, but it would be nice if it could request like, one post’s comments.
Like my server could remember the date that it “discovered” a community, and if I open a post that was made before that, then request the comments. There might need to be rate limits for such requests. But it would be nice