Thanks for digging that up. Had been one of my outstanding questions. I agree with the initial requestor of that issue; it will be a major source of friction for users migrating to Lemmy from Reddit.
I'd like to be able to at least manually trigger the retrieval of a set of posts/comments as a user. Otherwise as the requestor noted, its going to make interacting with "new" communities difficult and unintuitive if you can't see comments from before when it was synced to your local instance.
Are there any published guidelines on the server requirements for an instance? I have my own instance running, seems to be working fine. But I'm reluctant to open it publically without an idea of if I'm setting myself up for failure or not.
Related, is there a way to entirely disable image uploads to my instance? I'm ok with it being a "reader" instance, but don't want to be hosting content directly.
Votes and edits makes sense, sounds like a good guess to me!