Seems like the best thing to do would be to run that on a daily schedule and also ideally something done in the ui. I worry for those admins that just “followed the recipe” to get a Lemmy instance up and running but lack any real sysadmin ability.

I think theres probably a big overlap between the novice admins and the instances where the admins are unaware they are getting flooded with bot registration.

Will you be publishing an arm64 docker image for 0.17.4 soon?

Thanks for all you do!

Having some additional messaging about how communities work, and how to subscribe to them would help. I’m sorry that I assumed you didn’t know how to do that. I meant no offense but there’s no harm in providing free information that you (or someone else reading this post) might not know about.

There’s no way for an instance to know that you have an account on some other instance so the subscribe button assumes you are a local user. Maybe that could be addressed in the future, I don’t know what the plans are.

At a minimum I would think the subscribe button could have some logic that can detect whether you are logged in or not and then give you some options. Like, log into your account if you have one on this instance, or if you don’t here are instructions for adding this community to YOUR instance.

Yes you can subscribe to and read/reply to that community from any lemmy instance. You just need to add it if the instance doesn’t already federate with it.

Go to ‘Communities’ at the top of your instance homepage then in the search bar put the url of the community you want to add. (example: https://beehaw.org/c/programming)

This next part is undocumented, and might just be a bug. But this is the magic part.

On the next page, change the top search dropdown from Communities to All.

You will see the community you want to sub to in the results. It will say something like.

Programming@beehaw.org - 0 subscribers

Click it, then on the top right pane click “Subscribe”

Done

Making specialized instances does not in any way make hopping around necessary. If you join a specialized instance that doesn’t already sub to the communities you want, you just add them.

Example: I join a Star Trek themed instance that has a bunch of locally created star trek communities. I want to sub to all those, but i ALSO want to sub to the homelab community on beehaw. I just subscribe to !homelab@beehaw.org FROM the star trek instance I am a member of. That star trek instance will then start syncing the homelab content from beehaw and you can read and reply from the star trek instance.

Conversely, if someone has an account on beehaw.org and they want to read a star trek community based on that star trek instance, they just need to sub to it FROM beehaw.org.

I didn’t even see that discussion because I wasnt subbed to asklemmy and I haven’t been able to sub to any communities on lemmy.ml for two days now. I can’t reply to you there as a result. So while your hesitancy is warranted, you still have the same problem when a place like lemmy.ml hosts the communities you enjoy but then can’t handle the load. The end result is the same as it would be if a themed instance was unavailable or suddenly shut down.

Just plain old netinst installed Debian with XFCE. It just works.