Backfilling content

[thepaperpilot]

Requirements

• [X] Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• [X] Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• [X] Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• [X] Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.

Is your proposal related to a problem?

If someone creates a new lemmy instance for themselves, they need to find communities ok various other instances and subscribe to them so they start showing up on that instance. However, old posts don't get replicated meaning if they want to search for posts or browse older ones, they have to leave their home instance and go to the communities instance or one of the big instances that have been federating for a long time. This discourages users from creating small personal instances and encourages consolidating in a few large instances.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Have an option to backfill existing content when discovering a new instance. I think this would potentially cause issues with a large data request that could theoretically be abused, so perhaps the request could be queued or otherwise frequency limited.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

I think the main alternative is going to the community's instance to browse, although that doesn't them let you interact with your account on the small instance.

Additional context

No response

[Fmstrat]

Not backfilling specifically, but if you are just looking to speed up content on a new instance, Lemmy Community Seeder might be an alternative.

[Nutomic]

Implementing this directly in Lemmy is tricky, as it could easily overload instances by fetching data too quickly. It would probably be better and more flexible to implement it as a third-party tool which calls /api/v3/resolve_object for each post/comment.