By this I sort of mean like, in the case of Lemmy for example, something like a built-in Lemmyverse of sorts.
It wouldn’t be pulling in data yet from other instances, but it would enable seeing that their communities were out there so you could then tell your server you’d like to subscribe/follow/etc. their community/channel/account.
Tbh despite having been around the fediverse for awhile, I’m not sure how else ActivityPub servers were supposed to have these different things found to start with.
This feels like an impossible combination, where your local instance doesn’t have data from other instances, but also knows that they are out there. When a user searches their instance for something, the answer comes from local storage, in the same way that google responds by looking at its local cache of a webpage, not the webpage itself.
That’s kind of what I was thinking may be the case, but I’m not sure if I’m asking this well enough or if I may be misunderstanding ActivityPub.
It’s not clear to me how, without communication/searching outside of an ActivityPub instance, it would ever find other ActivityPub instances to connect to and communicate with.