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 @[email protected] 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/[email protected] 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 ([email protected] 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
    2·
    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
      2·
      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
        0·
        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?

        • 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)

  • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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

  • casey@lemmy.wiuf.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I am glad to see more people selfhosting their own. Makes me feel less out. Had the same issues.

  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

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

      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.

    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.