I’ve had a Lemmy instance running at lemmy.fdr8.us for a few days now. I read that federating is enabled by default but it can take some time, but so far the only instance I appear to be federated with is Lemmy.ml. What can I do to get my instance federated with other Lemmy instances?
A lemmy instance won’t start federating until a user has searched for and subscribed to a particular community. So, taking a peek at your instance it looks like you’ve only subscribed to one local “Announcements” community.
This is where things need to get a little creative. On my instance I have an account whose sole purpose is to search for and subscribe to interesting communities to fill up my “All” tab. I then use my main account to focus on the communities that I want to interact with regularly. I wrote a little script to automate that, but it’s still pretty simple to do manually.
I sort of just got it working. I searched and found a thread where someone said to try entering the full URL. I pasted in the https:// url from a community page on Lemmy.world and it worked. I wonder if that might clue anyone in to what is wrong with my setup. At least I can federate with more instances now though. Woot! Thanks for the help!
Interestingly now that I searched with the URL once and subscribed to a community, I can search with the [email protected] on lemmy.world. Apparently the URL trick is only necessary until federated. Lemmy.world content is showing up in my “all” feed already and things are looking good.
Hmm, it sounds like my configuration must be wrong then. I can’t search for anything on Lemmy.world, but Lemmy.ml works. Do you have any idea what might cause that?