Not much love here for the Pi Zero W. I love them for being so flipping cute. I have a couple I use when I am learning a new system admin tool or service and I need to be able to let it run undisturbed to observe stability and function.

Lately I am learning MQTT so am using one as a broker to manage some homemade smart devices.

If I can ever find one in stock, i want a couple of Zero 2 for similar projects that would benefit from the extra oomph.

That was my intuition, based mostly on the typical behavior of allow/block lists generally. Thank you.

As I understand it, the best way to promote small instances is to have users from other instances subscribe and contribute. This makes the communities visible on the subscribers instance so more people will see it.

Even small instances have to have something interesting enough to attract subscribers, there’s no substitute for interesting content.

OP, I understand and endorse the desire to help elevate the smaller instances, so it’s a worthwhile discussion the post has stimulated. Thanks!

I ask this partly as a question and partly to start a discussion I hope educates me on these details. I host a small instance too and definitely want to know these things better.

Is it necessary to add an instance to the allowed list? If federation is enabled, isn’t an instance ’allowed’ by default? Wouldn’t subscribing to communities on the small instances be of better benefit?

Thanks to anyone who understands the mechanics at play here and is willing to break it down.