I did a search from shitjustworks for “reddit die” and did not find https://lemmy.world/c/watchredditdie so I made https://sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie (unnecessarily). This should really not happen. When someone makes a community there should be a “ping” sent out to notify all other federated instances.
And from what I know, if I post to !sh.itjust.works/c/watchredditdie only users on sh.itjust.works will see the posts until other people from other instances randomly come across it somehow and subscribe? This really needs to be improved.
Tip is to feature it on the !newcommunities@lemmy.world community, crosspost the first few posts from there to more popular communities, and be sure to link various discussion threads from that community in other communities. Get people interested enough to Subscribe then posts will spread to that instance.
This inconvenience is partly by design in Lemmy. People that start up a new server don’t want to have ALL the content across the Fediverse rush through and explode their PC or hosted VM. Or a troll that makes a new community, spams a bunch of posts or puts up illegal material in a new community can easily be caught in the home instance before it spreads to others.
Isn’t it mostly text? Why would that be a heavy burden? Isn’t there an option to disable local hosting of images & videos?
Lemmy was able to be hosted on 1GB RAM machines, which may still work but less likely to be a good experience if you have too many instances in the federation queue even with just text. With images on, the biggest problem is the storage needs grew a lot.
Sharing/publishing lists of communities on a server to allow for automated subscribing seems like a good interim measure.