I’ve discovered Lemmy quite recently and I’m still learning how it works. One of the things I don’t get is how small communities can become known? On the main page I can only see communities that I’ve already subscribed to. I can also see popular posts on this instance. But how post in a community can become popular if no one has already joined it?
I’m not sure this is actually necessary. I found that a single post of a moderately-interesting community to !newcommunities@lemmy.world wound up federating my stuff to all the main instances instantly.
I get the concept, and maybe depending on the details of the network it might be needed (it might be a good approach on Mastodon for example, which has a much harder chicken-and-egg problem in terms of getting your stuff federated). I’m not sure it’s doing any active harm or anything. But at the same time I do feel like importing this kind of “not enough people are seeing my stuff how can I make sure as many people as possible see my stuff” tools over from the SEO marketer’s toolkit might be a bad habit or pattern to get into.
If a server has a bot set up on lemmy federate, the server is automatically loading posts for the community. Especially handy for smaller instances where none of the users on there have noticed the post, or have subscribed.
Since lemmy is still relatively small, a lot of people don’t subscribe, and instead use the all feed, and maybe even block communities that don’t interest them.