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.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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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)
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?
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...
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.
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'
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.
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)
I also got very excited when I found out you can edit thread titles haha. such a handy feature.
But there NEEDS to be a feature to check title history because it could be abused
Ya I'm confused why people think this is a good thing, the use cases where someone would edit a title in good faith seem very limited to people trying to take advantage of the feature
What I do is:
- I take the name "[email protected]"
- copy and paste it into the search in my instance
- press "search"
- it shows "No results."
- I go to Communities on my instance
- I click on "All"
- At the bottom of the list I can see "[email protected]" and the Subscribe button
I guess it is some kind of a bug. If I post a url of a post, it also takes qute some time, several seconds, until it shows up.
My process is similar, but i don't use the !ommunity@instance format. I just copy the url and search for it.
Search: "https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted"
it will initially return Nothing found but after another second, it shows up and i can click it and then subscribe to get new posts and comments.
Yep this is my process too, after search it does show up even if there are no results, you can just change the search filter to "All" and search again then it shows up, or you can go to communities to find it.
At the moment it's a bit convoluted, but you'll need to go to the search page (https://tortoisewrath.com/search) and then search for the name of the community, in this case [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). This will at first say no results but should eventually show the community (5-10 seconds in my case).
WOOOO I had to mash "search" for a while but I think I'm here now
I've found that searching for the name like that never works for me, but searching for the URL does eventually work.
Other times, the search doesn't appear to work, but the community does start appearing in the communities list under the "all" filter.
Sometimes, neither of those work. In those cases, I try searching for a post or comment URL. If that works, I can click on it and then click on the community from there.
Seems like there's a lot of rough edges at the moment.
For me it never shows a result but I am able to browse to the community on my instance and subscribe from there
Is there a description like this for kbin.social? Not sure if it's just because of some cloudfare issues but for example communities on the Lemmy instance feddit.de do not show up for me on kbin.social. Some of their posts do, though.
But if I search for e.g. [email protected] on kbin.social it won't show up and therefore I can't subscribe to it from kbin's side.
EDIT
Now it suddenly shows up under Magazines on kbin.social. How often do new communities on Lemmy instances get federated to kbin?
I believe you just need to remove the exclamation point and search for [email protected] on kbin. Not totally sure why but I expect this is just one of the kinks that'll be ironed out once things are less on fire around here
Just tested this, yes remove the exclam and it works.
I'd also like to know how it works. I switched to sh.itjust.works because it's a lot faster than lemmy.world, but trying to migrate my subscriptions, lemmy.ca doesn't show up, nor does lemmygrad.ml.
Things in the fediverse can be pretty fractured. Many instances block lemmygrad. Kbin has not been federating right because it is buggy, a newish feature for it, and/or under insane load. About 2 hours ago beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Similar things happened during the mastodon boom. Lots of federation/blocking drama between various instances. A lot of drama about "free speech" instances and NSFW in particular, IIRC. A lot of the GNU Social side of the fediverse leaned heavily into the "free speech" aspect, which was jarring for some new users/servers admins to mastodon.
Honestly, your best option is to selfhost or find a small instance with some sort of non-open admission policy. Even that can make things hard as some instances can have a restrictive federation policy (only federating to explicitly allowed instances), though I don't think that is a very popular at the moment. If spammers start spinning up their own servers instead of making accounts on open servers that may start happening.
This is the main reason I'm here - I realized that with an account on lemmy.world or something some admin somewhere could just unilaterally decide to defederate some major server and I wouldn't be able to get to half the communities I like anymore. And lo and behold, beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world while I was setting this up.
I always thought this mechanic would drive a lot of people away from the fediverse, but mastodon still seems to be pretty active after the mass migrations from Tumblr and Twitter so what do I know?
Re. Mastodon: Insular communities gonna insulate. Defederation has collateral damage, but among some communities that is acceptable because they view intolerance and the toleration of intolerance as close enough to warrant blanket handling. (See that "Nazi bar" story that's often cited)
Re. Lemmy: I think we will see much of the same. Lemmy is (IMO) in a slightly more immature state than Mastodon was when it had one of its early booms (when I ran an instance briefly). Especially w/r/t mod tools and stuff, which is part of why things are fragmenting at the moment.
I want my instance to run "under the radar" for the most part. Personally I'd rather leave things up to individuals to decide what they do or don't want to see. For example, if you enable NSFW content and browse "all" posts, don't be surprised if there is NSFW content there. Or content you don't agree with. But, if you borrow my car with my company logo on it (use my instance) to go to someone else's house (some community on another instance) and piss in their cornflakes (break that community's rules) I am not going to let you keep borrowing my car (kick you off my instance). And on the communities fully hosted on the instance itself I want them to generally be welcoming to others, which includes showing people who are not welcoming the door.
Oh interesting. I could selfhost and then have access to any of the instances? Would I be able to access an instance that's defederated? Seems like Beehaw has a ton of activity and now it's defederating. It's almost sus bc if I was trying to discredit the fediverse and Lemmy in general, I would get as many people on my instance as possible and then cut it off completely.
It depends. If they are choosing only to defederate specific instances, yes. If they are choosing only to federate with specific instances that leaves it up to you getting on the list by talking to those instance admins or something. If they are not federating at all then of course you're just out of luck.
Re. Beehaw: It's impossible to guess their intentions at this point. They appear to be (and say they are) only defederating specific instances and they are doing so for specific reasons. As I said to someone else talking about this just as it happened:
(Originally comparing this to some of the instance blocking that happened back when I ran a Mastodon server)
Insular communities gonna insulate. Defederation has collateral damage, but among some communities that is acceptable because they view intolerance and the toleration of intolerance as close enough to warrant blanket handling. (See that “Nazi bar” story that’s often cited)
(Then talking about how that relates to Lemmy)
IMO moderation necessarily has to exist two places in a federated environement. Yes, the community (hosting instance) always has to do moderation, but so does the federating instance. If the federating instance does not have policies in place to handle bad actors who go to other servers and break their rules and it is a large enough problem this action could make sense even well into the future. Unfortunately Lemmy is in a quite early state so I don’t think the tooling to do such work well even really exists. Something like only allowing confirmed posters from federated instance[s] or requiring someone to be subscribed for an amount of time before posting could do wonders. Yes, this is the nuclear option, but their choices at the moment are a butter knife or a nuke.
I sincerely hope this gets better as Lemmy matures.
Idk with ca but with lemmygrad you may just want to make an account there if you really want in
yeah there was some inbound federation struggles with lemmy.ca the past few days, those might still be persisting. its where I'm homed, it works great from the inside! :)
Doesn't lemmy.world block lemmygrad?
According to the lemmy.world Instances page, lemmygrad.ml is linked, not blocked. I know it's blocked on a number of other instances.
That's where I discovered the lemmygrad link so I don't think so
I wrote a post on my instance about how to add remote communities.
I use a Dell Wyse 5060 Thin Client as my file server and the reason for that is I needed something that is low powered as electricity isn't cheap in my country . My backup solution is really simple and cheap. I use a HDD docking station (only has one slot) as the main and a laptop HDD enclosure as secondary.
I've configured a script that would mirror the main drive to the laptop HDD. This executes every midnight. Then every week or two, i perform a cold storage backup to another laptop hard drive. This way, I keep a third snapshot in case either one of those two hard drives go out. Or if i need to restore a file to the original.
My thin client runs Windows 11 and I'll probably get crucified for it but in all honesty, it works just fine. It doesn't connect to the internet since I restricted it to only LAN on my router. If it needs an update, I simply just download the latest patch from Microsoft on another computer and then transferring it over to the server. File transfer speeds are what i expect from a mechanical HDD.
that's cool but I think this might be the wrong thread :)
I was having issues searching as well until I added a network to the docker-compose and then adding it to my lemmy image.
networks:
lemmybridge:
services:
lemmy:
networks:
- lemmybridge
Wish it would at least copy the instance list when federating, or have it as an option
Feels so empty browsing All when it’s identical to Subscribed
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3055 seems related
Thanks, gonna watch it. I wonder if it’s possible to set up some bot account that would just search for communuties to make them accessible?
I was thinking about writing a script that just periodically fetches the community list from some major servers and searches each of them on my own...
What happened here lol 
I was thinking about writing a script that just fetches the community lists from some popular instances then searches them on mine...
What happened here lol
lol, my bad. i replied from the wrong account and tried to delete it and do it again but I guess it didn't delete the first one fully
I am glad to see more people selfhosting their own. Makes me feel less out. Had the same issues.
Thanks for the post and resources, this is the first time I’ve seen this explained clearly in one place
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