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!
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?
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.