Wanted to cross post this here in case someone has had this issue before. Been dealing with this for a couple of days now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/94985

I set up my own personal Lemmy instance yesterday and everything seems to be up and running. I installed it on Docker with SSL enabled on a Digital Ocean droplet.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is federated search. I can search local communities, but no matter what I do I can’t get it to recognize other instances. I’ve tried:

And nothing shows up. I’ve tried the same search terms multiple times over the past day or so and nothing is changing. My instance has federation and federation debugging enabled (although I can’t figure out where the federation debugging outputs yet, because nothing in console log changes), and as far as I can tell there are no errors in the Docker logs that could point me in a specific direction. Where can I start looking to properly debug this?

EDIT: I needed to expose my lemmy backend to the proxy network. This answer here helped me get to the solution. Thanks so much! https://lemmy.world/comment/150173

  • JeenaEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    I have a simmilar problem, but I found out when you search for [email protected] then wait a second and go to the Communities tab and choos “All” then you will see the one you searched for in the list and then you can subscribe to it.

    • arpEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      yeah, sometimes just refreshing (or waiting) on the search window works, and then a instance friendly link will show up

  • @[email protected]English
    3•1 year ago

    Check sudo docker logs lemmy_lemmy_1 right after you search. I was getting http get request failures to the other servers.

    Add ‘lemmyexternalproxy’ to networks for the lemmy service in docker-compose.yml and rebuild ‘sudo docker-compose up -d --build’

    Fixed it for me.

    Edit: just read the part about nothing in the logs. If this is not it, I’m not sure.

    • @penguin_ex_machinaOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      I’m almost positive that network is already there but I’m definitely going to check the Lemmy-specific logs. I only knew how to check the general server logs when I last looked at it. If I ever get my kid to bed I’ll take another look.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Might be, the current docker-compose.yml has it in there properly. However, when I used the install with docker guide a day or two ago it hard linked to the 0.17 version which didn’t give external network access to the lemmy service. Sounded similar to the problem I was facing, but if you used the current docker-compose.yml I guess that is not it.

        It sounds like the back end has no external network access. You can check with something like sudo docker exec -it lemmy_lemmy_1 ping archlinux.org

        • @penguin_ex_machinaOPEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          !!! THAT DID IT.

          Thank you so much I would have never gotten to that solution on my own. Works beautifully now.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Awesome! No problems, I’m glad I could help. Took me a bit to figure out what was going on too.

  • @PriorProjectEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Have you read option two of finding a community in https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827 and followed the steps there exactly? Lemmy’s search for remote communities is pretty confusing and there are lots of ways to get an empty resultset for no good reason. That post will get you on the golden path if that’s your issue though.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•1 year ago

    Try searching either way and wait. At first it will show “No results” or similar but after about 10 seconds it should go away. Then either the result will show, or you need to change selector to “Local” (its a bug). But you need to wait for “No results” to go away.