LSB Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

This post aims to collate the most frequently asked questions for the bot I wrote.

Errors

{"error":"couldnt_find_that_username_or_email"} OR KeyError: 'jwt'

Either your credentials are invalid, or you have not created a user for LSB.

Others

What was the motivation behind this?

As of the writing of this tool (Jul 2023), there is no easy way for personal/small Lemmy instance users to discover communities outside of their own. You might suggest using one of the many aggregators out there, like Lemmy Explorer, but the whole act of adding a community, one by one, is a painful, arduous and unintuitive experience altogether. This tool was written to give the users of the instance a view of what communities might be out there without having to jump through hoops, and if popular enough (meeting the requirements of the bot subscribing), an overview of the community without the user having to subscribe to it.

Wouldn’t this cause unnecessary load on upstream servers?

Well, yes. It is undeniable that in the wrong hands, this tool, and by extension, the many tools just like this, can cause havoc on the larger Lemmy instances out there. As of this writing, I do not have a solution for that, except to try and alleviate some possible causes for concern by only subscribing to the most active communities that an average Lemmy user might find interesting.

How much disk space is this tool expected to cause?

As of the writing of this tool, and size of the fediverse (Jul 2023), using this tool, may result in disk space usage of around 2GiB/day, according to my own metrics.