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, memes@lemmy.ml and lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world 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 memes@sopuli.xyz
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.
In my very limited experience with my personal instance, I've had to give federation time for it to start working as expected. When I started out, sometimes I wouldn't find posts or my comments wouldn't show on the instance a post came from and whatnot, don't notice that anymore. Could easily be something wonky on my end though, I'm not sure.
One thing that I still find extremely confusing and unintuitive is searching for a not yet federated community doesn't return any results, but also immediately makes the community visible in the "all" view if it does indeed exist. I was under the impression it'd just show the community link there and then so I assumed it was broken for the longest time, for all I know that's actually how it's supposed to go and I still have something broken somewhere lol.
When you search for a new community on another instance it fetches the latest posts from it so it doesn't usually show in the search for a little bit. This could be tweaked with a better API/interface to make it load though (ie notice it's a new community and wait for it to download before search returns)