Hi, I just created the community for my hometown on Lemmy.ca and noticed that within minutes it already has 35 subscribers. How does that work? The town is tiny, I’d be surprised if there were even 35 people from Renfrew on Lemmy at all, let alone eagerly waiting for the community to be created

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    39·
    17 hours ago

    Bots.

    Some instances will auto-sub to new communities. It helps make sure everyone can reach everyone. Nobody on one instance can “see” the new community until someone goes there the first time, so the bots just sub in and it’s handled.

    At least, that’s the explanation I’ve seen when this has vibe come up before.

    • NotSteve_OPEnglish
      10·
      17 hours ago

      Oh yeah that makes sense. I knew there were federation bots but I didn’t put two and two together. Thanks for the explanation!

    • DeaDvey@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      15 hours ago

      It would be nice if instances could choose to federate to all new communities without anyone subscribing to it. Is this possible?

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
        11·
        15 hours ago

        Not with the way the protocol is designed, no. Content is pushed to other instances by basically sending the event to every subscribers, so it inherently requires some kind of active subscription to receive content. And thus the bots.

        Technically, ActivityPub would support a system of private communities and profiles, where the remote user have to accept your subscription/follow first, so it makes more sense seen that way why it’s not just broadcasting everything to everyone. Lemmy doesn’t support that and makes all content visible to everyone, so each instance really only needs one bot user to subscribe to every community it can find, and it shows up in everyone’s All feed which many use to discover content. And thus the bot subscriptions, one per instance that runs one of those.

        On my small private instance it also makes sense I only receive content which I’m subscribed to, it makes my storage requirements much smaller and reduces the overall load for everyone by only federating what is necessary.

        A simple workaround though would be for those bot users to have a special flag on them where instances can ignore them from the count to get a more accurate number, but it’s pretty low on the priority list. Plus when you have 1k, 5k, 10k subscribers, those 50-100 bot users stop being meaningful anyway.

    • NotSteve_OPEnglish
      8·
      12 hours ago

      If you enjoy meth and walking around Walmart in your cookiemonster pajamas then yes

      Admittedly I don’t live there anymore but I feel a sense of responsibility to bring it to the fediverse