Lemmy needs better integration/federation. Too much content is hidden. A community on the biggest instance was not visible to me on another large instance.
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.
It probably didn't show up in the first place it only has 66 subscribers, and probably none on SJW.
About your second point, you indeed have to promote your community, using !newcommunities@lemmy.world, or related communities. This works quite well usually.
I will add that in your case, people knew about your community as you posted in other communities, but as discussed then, people seemed happy with the existing Reddit-focused communities.
I definitely don't agree. I think this is very problematic. I rely on all to find new communities. I don't think one newcommunities sub is a valid replacement. It would suffer from the same issue -- people would have to spam their post to every single instances's newcommunities sub, which is ridiculous and not even viable.
Relying on !all to have your newly created community to reach most of the people could work, but using the Scaled sort as it wouldn't have enough subscribers to push it using Hot or Active.
There is only one !newcommunities@lemmy.world, it has 15k subscribers, seems like a pretty good way to promote it.
I'm not even subscribed to that, and even if I was, and it was a default subscription for every new lemmy.world user, I don't think it's a good replacement for a functional search or an all that includes all posts from federated instances. I see lots of posts on all-hot with 0-5 upvotes so it seems fine if it actually showed all communities on federated instances (which it doesn't).
There is a security issue by allowing automatic federation with any federated instance: an attacker could just create a huge number of communities, with a large number of posts, exhausting the resources of small instances.
That's what I guess it the main reason why it works like it does now: the server only gets the content if someone is interested.
I do encourage people on reddit to come here, but as another reddit mod recently said on lemmy, they're waiting for improvements on lemmy (like /r/toolbox, RES) before being able/willing to move over.
But your solution would require every new instance to subscribe to every community in existence even if no users there care about certain ones. It's innefficient.
I agree community discovery could be improved but let's say I had an instance with 200 users and none speak German. Would it make sense for my instance to still pull everything from the German language communities and clutter an All feed where no one can read it? Or is it better to wait for a German speaking user to register and actively choose to participate in those communities before federation begins?
I think the way federation works as a whole would have to be reworked for your solution. Simply federating with all communities not on your black list isn't the best solution.
The whole point of Redditors migration to Lemmy is to replace Reddit. You're absolutely free to deploy your own instance and develop your own fork or extensions to Lemmy's code so it works in a way you prefer on your terms.