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
    21·
    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
      12·
      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
        5·
        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?

        • TortoiseWrath@tortoisewrath.comEnglish
          3·
          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…

          • sirdavidxvi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            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.

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

            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’

        • 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.

  • IcySyndicate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Jeena@jemmy.jeena.netEnglish
    6·
    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
      4·
      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
      2·
      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.

  • dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.winEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world. This will at first say no results but should eventually show the community (5-10 seconds in my case).

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Midas@ymmel.nlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      For me it never shows a result but I am able to browse to the community on my instance and subscribe from there

  • ParsnipWitch@kbin.social
    4·
    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?

    • rideranton@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      I believe you just need to remove the exclamation point and search for ich_iel@feddit.de 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

  • livingcoder@lemmy.austinwadeheller.comEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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
    • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
      3·
      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.

      • TortoiseWrath@tortoisewrath.comEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          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.

      • 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.

    • tezoatlipoca@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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! :)

    • hannaEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Idk with ca but with lemmygrad you may just want to make an account there if you really want in

  • cellar_door@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    Thanks for the post and resources, this is the first time I’ve seen this explained clearly in one place

  • neoney@lemmy.neoney.devEnglish
    2·
    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

  • casey@lemmy.wiuf.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

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