I am trying to find an additional home base lemmy that I jive with that is a bit smaller and less likely to get crushed. While exploring I have found disparities in which foreign communities I can search for and find despite all being in the federated instance list. Most of the time I can’t find the community I know exists, or I do find and the User count is so wildly off that I question if I have found the correct one(I have).
It seems to me that the communities@foreignInstance are irregularly/periodically updated into a local cache. If I am correct can Lemmy servers at least expose ‘Last Update time’, ‘Next Update time’ and just general mean time between updates?
Lemmy instances only know about communities in other instances until a user searched for it, so a bigger instance like lemmy.ml is more likely to already have each community you search for.
But an instance like mine won’t have them unless I manually search for them to be imported.
And also, in my instance I won’t be getting updates from that community to see in the “all” feed until I subscribe, so my “subscriptions” will be the same as “all”.