So I set up a self-hosted lemmy instance to play around with but I’m a bit confused by how the federation system is supposed to work.

I followed these instructions to get setup:

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/install_docker.html

I then found that I was having issues deploying the lemmy proxy as it could not find the nginx config. I was able to resolve that issue by adding the nginx internal config from the git to my instance like so:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/main/templates/nginx_internal.conf

I noticed that I couldn’t search for any instances from my personal instance, so in the “Allowed Instances” in the server settings on the web UI I added: lemmy.ml lemmy.world programming.dev and sopuli.xyz

I figured that adding some of the major instances should kick-start the federation process and allow it to find other things, but it seems it does not.

Now I’ve been able to subscribe to a couple communities from my instance, [email protected] and [email protected] and of course this Selfhosted community. However, I still cannot seem to add others, for example it still fails to find anything when I try to add [email protected]

Additionally, I can’t seem to see comments from most other users on most of the posts that I do see for some reason. Even if those users are from one of those instances I’ve allowed, I still don’t see them.

Does anybody have any idea why this might be? For example, I’m quite sure I’m not going to see any of the comments on this post even though I posted it, I’ll probably have to come back and check on another account to reply and I really don’t understand why and would like to find a fix.

Thanks.

  • GeekyLink@gekinzuku.comOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for the description, seems a little counterintuitive to me, but I think I get it now. I removed the allow list and after some time it cleared up quite a bit, also rebooted it and then the “hot” page looked a lot better. I think another issue is that my instance has a pitiful amount of resources and is very slow so it also just takes a long time to get synced up with new communities but it’s definitely better now after some days.