Hi, I've got my instance (the one I'm posting from) running a couple days ago. Everything seems to work, but I notice that the little content I have on my instance can only very rarely be found from other instances. I installed lemmy with the ansible method, but is there something I should still look at myself? Thanks.
Hi! I've checked and federation with your instance appears to be working properly.
For content from another instance to fetched, a person in your instance has to be subscribed to the community in which it is posted in the other instance. As an admin I try to browse other instances and subscribe liberally so that I can pull content into mine.
Likewise, for your content to be fetched to another instance, you need a user from that instance to be subscribed to the community in your instance.
If you search for a specific post, the content of that post will be pulled into the instance from which it is searched, but you need a subscriber to pull new posts.
I can't tell you why this happens, but I can tell you that if you search - click somewhere to go to another page - and then search again for the same url, then the post should appear. I think that the first search will fetch the post but not display it, and the second search it will display it.
It will fetch the first 20 posts when the community is first searched from your instance (but no votes, comments etc). Once any local user subscribes to the community, all new posts/comments/votes etc will be delivered to your instance. Old items will only be fetched on demand (eg if you search them, or if they are referenced by a new item).
Federation for Lemmy and mastodon works on a need to know basis. Otherwise even the smallest server never used would have to download all content immediately all the time.
What this means is that a community will only show and receive posts if someone from your server joins it.
Right now it's still okay to join every community that you see (I do that), but with increasing traffic that won't be useful.
It still helps a lot because most of the load is coming from serving up the feed. Just federating the data to another server is much lighter than serving up everything via the instance's website.
Thanks for clarification, glad I've kept configs, just stopped it. Can't say yet if I like lemmy and will stay, but I hope that'll turn up to something great soon, so that instance will run again.