They don’t appear to have federation enabled yet.

Early on we were experimenting with trying to offer everything on the fediverse from a Lemmy instance. A lot of changes and tweaks were made to try to make that work before it was abandoned. There’s a lot of leftover bloat from that project that we’ve been trying to deal with without too much impact to the Lemmy instance but for the size of the instance it makes more sense to start over than to spend even more time trying to undo the wrongs of the past. There isn’t a specific cautionary tale here besides “don’t go public with things that you hope to fix later.”

More recently we’ve had issues with our registrar or DNS pop up that no one seems to have answers for yet, so sometimes the domain itself isn’t reachable. One problem or the other might not be a huge deal in the short term but together they make for a miserable time trying to sort things out. Moving the traffic to a known good config will help me maintain sanity while dealing with the issues at WG.

Lemmy has mangled that script a bit.

Lemmy seems to mangle a lot of links that aren’t basic urls. SimpleX chat links break for some reason here too.

Thank you for the suggestions. At this point it seems the best option may be to just shutter this instance and start over with a fresh database instead of dealing with a bunch of nagging problems from previous experiments. I’ve done plenty of testing in production because for most of that time it was only me being affected by the consequences lol.

Maybe it’s part of your instance image policy?

Edit - Need coffee and weed before getting on Lemmy. I can’t read apparently and missed that you tried this on your own instance as well. My bad.

Yeah that would do it lol. Thanks for that info.

Apologies OP, I don’t keep up with who’s blocking who on Lemmy.

It could be that LBZ hasn’t discovered the community yet. If that’s the case you may have to try a couple times before it actually populates. One of many federation quirks. Here are some other links to try.

!mutual_aid@hexbear.net

https://hexbear.net/c/mutual_aid

There’s !mutual_aid@hexbear.net which I believe allow GoFundMe links.

mailbox.org

I can’t say for certain but the fediverse is prone to behave unpredictability at times. You’re probably better off thinking about Lemmy as a collection of websites rather than one central hub like reddit or more traditional sites.

Instances go up and down all the time as well. Sometimes when a site goes down for maintenance (and probably other things like sync issues) the subscriber numbers will fluctuate because a bunch of them are on a site that “doesn’t exist” for a short time while it’s being worked on.

Everything you do on Lemmy takes longer than what you’re probably used to on a more traditional website too. Your posts to your local instance should be instantaneous but sometimes it can take minutes, hours, or even days for those actions to fully federate to other places. This is true of posts, replies, votes, and subscriptions.

There is also defederation which can cause the behavior you described. You are on one of the largest instances on Lemmy and some people have soured on it and its users. It’s entirely possible some of your subscribers were on an instance that defedderated with lemmy.world or something.

TLDR: You are likely overthinking the impact of bots and putting too much importance on subscription numbers. Make sure the community you care about can actually reach the people who might be interested and hope for the best.

Only slightly related but maybe you’d be interested -

I put together a help post for new Lemmy users on my instance describing how to find and join new places on Lemmy. Maybe these resources will help you understand more about how Lemmy works and how you can get your community off the ground.

https://walledgarden.xyz/post/1600683

Bots are not nearly as widespread on Lemmy as they are on reddit. You’re letting your frustration with a slow growing community turn into “old man yells at cloud.”

The main use of bots is for federating. They join communities but don’t interact with posts at all. Even that requires an instance admin to set up so it’s not like there are thousands of them or something. Bedsides that the rest of them are mostly news and information shares.

Lemmy is much smaller than reddit and has more barriers to entry and community growth. Expect it to take months to get a community off the ground.

It seems like you don’t actually understand how to get your community posts to more people.

Lemmy doesn’t spread content to all other instances by default. The whole process is pretty clunky and takes far more effort than it should to promote new places.

Have you announced the community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world or anything? Discovery on Lemmy leaves a lot to be desired in its current form.

What censorship?

Plenty of people are delighted when the community they forgot they subscribed to months ago suddenly has new content!

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Lemmyverse will let you search every community hosted by Lemmy instances that share data with it, which is most. If you set your home instance before you start clicking links they’ll open on your home instance so they are easier to subscribe to.

Here’s a recent post I put together with some more resources:

https://walledgarden.xyz/post/1600683

Edit- Also worth mentioning the Voyager interfaces offer a solution for this.