I have a new Lemmy server (lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me) and I've noticed only communities I subscribe to show up.
The idea was to have my own local instance but I don't see how I can find new communities without using another instance first and finding those communities there and then manually adding them to mine. I have found the following two github projects:
Use a site like browse.feddit.de to find communities you want to join and join them. Every instance only "has" their local communities plus whatever remote communities the users of the instance join. With more users it is more likely someone else has subscribed to something you are interested in, but someone on e.g. lemmy.world had to be the first user there to search and subscribe to any community that isn't based on that instance.
What's interesting about this is that there really isn't an r/All. All@lemmy.world will be different from All@beehaw.org, will be different from All@lemmy.ml, and will be VERY different from All@lemmynsfw.com
Yeah, as someone who used Mastodon back in the day this wasn't surprising, as they sorta highlighted your vs local vs public timeline, but I can totally see how it could be confusing expecting Lemmy to just be a "reddit clone". And TBF it is a reddit clone of sorts if you disable federation, "All" is everything your instance can possibly access, but then you lose out on what IMO is the killer feature.
There is probably a way you could spider instances and scrape content to get an "All" of sorts...
Yeah, this is kind of disappointing. There's no consistent experience. What I see may be very different from what you see and while that's in itself is not necessarily bad, it makes it hard to discover communities.
I guess it's the price we pay for decentralization and I'm okay with that.
Use lemmyverse.net to find communities across all instances. It will make you search a lot easier, and show you when a community exists on multiple instances
Lemmy Community Seeder works pretty well. You may want to experiment with which servers you pull from though ( beehaw consistently gave me errors which caused LCS to crash). You can set up a specific account without any admin or moderator privileges if you don't feel comfortable using your personal account (all the account really does is subscribe to the top communities from the servers set in your config). As far as I can tell you only really need to run it once in a while to get an updated list of popular servers.
I added Top Hour. I left the run schedule at 240 minutes but it seems to keep up pretty well. I'm regularly subscribing to new communities from the All tab
LCS is pretty great but now my database is growing pretty big. To some extent, I guess it's something that will eventually happen anyway. Might as well start early?