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
    4·
    2 years 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
      4·
      2 years 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
        2·
        2 years 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·
          2 years 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.

        • TortoiseWrath@tortoisewrath.comEnglish
          1·
          2 years 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…

    • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
      1·
      2 years 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)

    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
      1·
      2 years 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·
        2 years 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.

      • ultimate_question@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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

  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    What I do is:

    • I take the name “!selfhosted@lemmy.world”
    • 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 “!selfhosted@lemmy.world” 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·
      2 years 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.

    • jsqribe@feedly.j-cloud.ukEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • ParsnipWitch@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    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. !ich_iel@feddit.de 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?

  • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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