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)
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.
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)
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?
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)
Thanks, this is helpful!
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.
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 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 instancea 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.
Doesn’t lemmy.world block lemmygrad?
That’s where I discovered the lemmygrad link so I don’t think so
@sdg@lemmy.world Maybe edit the post with the solution, it will be useful to others.
ok
I am glad to see more people selfhosting their own. Makes me feel less out. Had the same issues.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 Subscribedhttps://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 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 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 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
