Right now, we are only able to view an instance’s specific community, but I’d love to be able to view what’s popular in that instance, especially that I do not know what communities that instance has.
EDIT And this is where it gets confusing…
If you want to view another instance from your home instance you need to do https://lemmy.world/c/thecommunityyouwanttoview@lemmy.ml
But there is no https://lemmy.world/c/lemmy.ml
<– this will return a 4040
Ideally there would be a https://lemmy.world/c/all@lemmy.ml
or a https://lemmy.world/c/popular@lemmy.ml
If you go to Posts/All, you will see all the local communities plus all the communities subscribed to by the instance. I don’t foresee every instance mirroring the content of every community from every other instance - storage and bandwidth would go through the roof.
Doing some reading + confirming with an instance owner, this is how it’s working now. You can click on the “Instances” link at the very bottom of the page to see who else your instance is connected to. An instance mirrors all content for all other instances its connected to.
Edit: correction, it’s mirroring all content from all communities that it knows about (that users have tried accessing), which is what I think you were saying in the first place.
Correct. Someone has to search for a community before the instance mirrors the community.