I was told that I should post this here.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/932750
Say you decide to self-host a Lemmy instance. When you create that instance, do you immediately need to download and store all the data that has ever been posted to all federated Lemmy instances? Or perhaps you only need to download and store everything that is posted to the federated Lemmy instances from that point forward? Or better yet, do you only store what the users on that instance do (i.e. their posts, and posts to the communities hosted on that instance)?
Your lemmy instance starts off blank. Then you create local communities and maybe post there. To connect to other communities, you search for the URL of that community using the search function. At that point, it pulls the current posts but none of the comments, and if you subscribe then you start seeing the comments on the posts.
One thing, joining a bunch of remote instances takes some time at first since it’s a manual process. Soon you have a really solid timeline though.
Yeah it takes maybe a day and then it’s solid!