Alright so I’m pretty dumb when it comes to this stuff…I’m on the shit works instance, so does that mean I can see all the stuff on the others when I go too ALL or are the all different?
Long answer: Instances federate with each other by default. Sometimes an instance defederates from a particular other instance, usually for good reasons (and oftentimes you’re not missing out on valuable stuff). Your instance hosts your account and stuff you post, but connects you to stuff hosted on other instances as well. If some instance goes down, noone can access stuff posted from that instance (like users, posts etc.)
So basically you have the instance you are looking at. That instance has a list of communities (from any instance) that it knows about. A new community is added whenever somebody on that instance views or subscribes to that community for the first time.
When you go to ALL on that instance, it will show only posts from those communities (which are listed in the Communities/ALL tab). So larger instances (which know about more communities) will tend to have more stuff in ALL.
There is also the issue of defederating, where the instance decides to block other instances, and communities from those instances will not show up in ALL.
So ALL is a bit misleading since it doesn’t show posts from all communities on the Lemmyverse, but only ones that the instance knows about and chooses to federate with. However, a lot of the large servers will probably be pretty similar content-wise (except for ones like Beehaw that defederated from other large instances for various reasons).
I believe there’s a tool someone made that will have your instance pre-seed itself with other communities so they show up in all regardless of user subscription. Can’t find it atm
Alright so I’m pretty dumb when it comes to this stuff…I’m on the shit works instance, so does that mean I can see all the stuff on the others when I go too ALL or are the all different?
Short answer: yeah.
Long answer: Instances federate with each other by default. Sometimes an instance defederates from a particular other instance, usually for good reasons (and oftentimes you’re not missing out on valuable stuff). Your instance hosts your account and stuff you post, but connects you to stuff hosted on other instances as well. If some instance goes down, noone can access stuff posted from that instance (like users, posts etc.)
So basically you have the instance you are looking at. That instance has a list of communities (from any instance) that it knows about. A new community is added whenever somebody on that instance views or subscribes to that community for the first time.
When you go to ALL on that instance, it will show only posts from those communities (which are listed in the Communities/ALL tab). So larger instances (which know about more communities) will tend to have more stuff in ALL.
There is also the issue of defederating, where the instance decides to block other instances, and communities from those instances will not show up in ALL.
So ALL is a bit misleading since it doesn’t show posts from all communities on the Lemmyverse, but only ones that the instance knows about and chooses to federate with. However, a lot of the large servers will probably be pretty similar content-wise (except for ones like Beehaw that defederated from other large instances for various reasons).
I believe there’s a tool someone made that will have your instance pre-seed itself with other communities so they show up in all regardless of user subscription. Can’t find it atm