Because my instance only has two users my ‘local’ feed is basically a copy of my ‘subscribed’ feed plus a couple posts from communities that my wife subscribes to that I don’t.

But if you switch to "all" instead of subscribed and sort by active or hot you see the popular posts on all of lemmy, right? And you see all the communities under /communities link?

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

No. Only communities that at least one local user is subscribed to are federated into an instance.

And I realize I made a mistake in the feed names. My local feed is completely empty. My 'all' feed is what I was intending to describe with that comment. It is just the communities that either my wife or I have subscribed to. I haven't done this yet but I was reading about a project that admins can add to their instance that effectively creates a phantom user to subscribe to lots of content all across the fediverse. It's intended to help bridge the gap between very small instances and the rest of the fediverse by ensuring that your 'all' feed actually aggregates content from other instances without requiring you to subscribe.

I'm blanking on the name and can't find the posts I saved about it, but I'd really like to try it out to make it easier to come across new communities organically without having to hunt them down.

[–] Flumpkin@slrpnk.net 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Ah thanks, very interesting to know.

It's very unlikely I'm going to run my own instance, although I would like the freedom to tinker with the web client. Probably going to try to just run the UI client locally at some point.