Edit: YOOOOOOOO YOU CAN EDIT TITLES HERE

Anyway, you have to first search for the community in the format !whatever@where.ever. It doesn’t show up the first time but if you mash Enter for a while it will…

Also, this FAQ linked by @Wistful@discuss.technics.de is pretty helpful and covers some of the pitfalls of being the first (or only!) person in an instance to subscribe to a community: https://lemm.ee/post/37715

Edit 2: Found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3055 requesting better support for discovering federated communities. Please consider upvoting that issue if you have a github account and think it would be helpful!

I made myself a lemmy: https://tortoisewrath.com

You may notice I am not writing to you from said lemmy… because https://tortoisewrath.com/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world is a 404. In fact, though it appears to have federated itself with a bunch of other servers, it only appears to be able to see two communities. These were among the first few communities I tried to access (technology@beehaw.org didn’t work but those two did) - since adding those two, I haven’t been able to see any others, even on lemmy.ml where the first two were.

Is this normal? Do I just need to be more patient and it’ll figure it out on its own, or is there some switch I need to flip to make it do the thing?

(Apologies if this is obvious to those who understand the fediverse but I have no idea what I’m doing)

  • sirdavidxvi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    Have you tried searching for the communities first? As I understand it from some other posts, if you try to access a remote community via URL through your home instance before it “knows” about it, you’ll get the 404 error. Someone (you) on your instance has to make your instance “aware” of the remote community by searching for it first. Then, after your instance is aware of the community and federating it, you can access it via URL as you posted above.

    • sdg@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      THANK YOU

      I didn’t remember doing this for the first two, but I guess I must have. (I would reply from there, but comments haven’t synced yet, which I guess is expected)

      • sirdavidxvi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        I’m glad that worked. I’m considering launching a personal self-hosted instance of my own, so I may be in your shoes soon enough.

        How did you find the process? Did you use Docker or Ansible?

        • TortoiseWrath@tortoisewrath.comEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          If you can read this, the Ansible playbook mostly Just Worked™ to install it on a clean Debian VPS. I actually did start over at one point because I wanted to change the domain name after learning there’s not currently any way to use different domains for the UI and usernames like there is in Mastodon (relevant github issue); from that, I suspect it should be good about not clobbering anything except maybe SSL certs for existing nginx sites.

          For some reason, my nginx also now seems to try to use the cert lemmy installed by default, even on a site I just set up to only listen on port 80 (http://gillen.dev). So that’s kinda weird, but just installing a new cert for such a site with certbot fixes it (https://sdg.fyi).

          It still seems to be struggling a little bit: votes and comments on this thread are taking a looong time to show up here (your comment just got here and it says it was from 24 minutes ago)… or maybe I’m just impatient :)

          Of course, the real test will be when it comes time to update to the next Lemmy version…

          • sirdavidxvi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            Thanks, that’s good info. If I do go forward, I was planning on going the Ansible route, though I’ve never used it before.

            I’ve read that it can take a bit of time to sync when you first federate, but that after some period of time it gets closer to real-time with posts and comments.

          • cereal7802@lemmy.game-files.netEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Of course, the real test will be when it comes time to update to the next Lemmy version…

            it is easy enough. Simply run the playbook again. well, git pull the ansible playbook again and then run it. alternatively you can just use docker compose now on your lemmy server. I made some aliases on my lemmy instance based on what i use elsewhere. I think I got them from a linuxserver.io tutorial ages ago. you will need to adjust the container versions for this to be viable as the version is hardcoded and they only have a “latest” tag for arm.

            alias dckill=‘docker kill $(docker ps -q)’

            alias dclogs='docker-compose -f /srv/lemmy/lemmy.domain/docker-compose.yml logs -tf --tail=“50” ’

            alias dcpull=‘docker-compose -f /srv/lemmy/lemmy.domain/docker-compose.yml pull’

        • useful_idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          This is so damn cool! I am going to be adapting the docker stacks to nomad jobs and running one on my homelab cluster. I was pretty bummed about Reddit this month I am stunned at how good Lemmy is.

    • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      For me this is happening at a community level, not instance.

      Like I can be federated with lemmy.ml or beehaw.org but to join/index a community I haven’t been to, I have to spam search first to get the server to pull it. Then I’m good (except for lemmy.ml which I have a ton of pending subscribes going)