I understand the goal of the tool, the defaults are a really bad approach at achieving it and the docs are really bad at identifying the pitfalls. A tool that subscribes to a list of communities provided in a text file would be great. Subscribing to the entire lemmyverse is a solution that creates problems that are worse than the discovery problem.

I agree that there’s probably no reason to subscribe to the whole lemmyverse if the majority of them are barren and void of activity. Subscribing to a list of communities provided in a text file… would still require user intervention to actually source said list of communities, and if that’s the case, copy-pasting into a text file, is not any easier than copying into the Lemmy search bar and hitting enter.

All of this content seems fairly clearly to me to fall into the category “content that can cause legal liability for the hoster depending on their jurisdiction”. Is that a controversial point of debate?

No, I hold no opinion on that stance, you make a valid point.

This all sounds eminently reasonable. 800 subs is a lot, but it’s much more reasonable than the 7k subs this tool leaves you with in it’s default config, and if you further curate it manually and that’s what it takes for your feed to feel lively… then go for it.

While that is the case for my own tool, I believe the author of Lemmony has already patched the code to only subscribe to the top instances, which shouldn’t leave anyone with 7k subscriptions. For me, while I don’t de-federate from right-wing subs on my instance (since I give the freedom for anyone on my instance to follow anything they want), I also configured my bot to not subscribe to any either.

Maybe consider releasing it? I totally agree that community discovery is rough all over, and moreso on tiny instances. A tool to help folks bootstrap 50-200 communities and that did a good job documenting the tradeoffs of oversubscription and helped folks identify/avoid legal risk would be a huge step up from the “subscribe all” approach.

It’s released, it’s in my profile, but given recent debate over Lemmony on OP’s multiple threads, I’m second-guessing whether or not my solution is the correct one. Undecided as of now I suppose.

Content is NOT served from the original instance. […]

I stand corrected, I guess I was referring to the full-sized images. You definitely make a valid point that the content of the post itself, in some jurisdictions, may already cause legal complications. I guess this is something Lemmy as a software, and as a community, would need to find a way to adapt to.

This is also not true. In the US, you have to register a copyright agent to receive the kinds of protection typically associated with commercial hosts. If you fail to do so, I believe that you run the risk of just getting sued out of the gate for copyright issues. There are also almost certainly jurisdictions where hosting gay porn or certain political speech is a “straight to jail” kind of maneuver.

Again, fair. I was shortsighted when I made my previous statements.

Of course, I have no evidence that OP is in a particularly dangerous jurisdiction. But my broader point is that new users of single-user instance often don’t consider that they may be signing up to host legally risky content that they themselves didn’t create, view, or want. If one curates their list of subs, they can gauge for themselves what communities they consider to be risky. If they “subscribe all”, they WILL be serving to the unauthenticated public internet the worst of the lemmyverse without realizing it… which is an entirely avoidable situation.

It would definitely be better for Lemmy in the long run, if there was a way for personal/small Lemmy instances to view another instances communities in its entirety (posts & comments) without storing anything on the database, a-la proxy but for Lemmy. Otherwise, discovery of content would always remain as an entry barrier for the average Lemmy user, further complicating the centralisation of the Fediverse as it is.