Like many of you, I’m here thanks to the Great Reddit APIocalypse. In order to keep our active, tight-knit subreddit hobby community intact, I decided to create a server for our community to be able to continue no matter what happens on Reddit. Despite some challenges, things are going pretty well and our active user base is growing.
I really need help with federation, though. I managed to federate my server with Lemmy.ml, but when I look at Lemmy.ml communities from my account on that server I only see posts and comments from people at Lemmy.ml. I’d like to be able to federate with all servers so the users of our server can join communities all over Lemmy and see comments from users of all other Lemmys. Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to make that happen? Also, are there some Lemmys that I should ban no matter what?
I'm not sure what you mean when you say you managed to federate with lemmy.ml communities... federation should be on by default. As an admin, you should leave the Allowed Instances box empty to allow federation with all instances.
Unfortunately, that does not appear to be working. When I first set up my Lemmy I was unable to see any federated communities. It was only after I put Lemmy.ml into the allow list that I was able to access Lemmy.ml communities and see posts by Lemmy.ml users. I even just tried deleting Lemmy.ml from my allow list and it went back to the previous behavior. Could I have some setting wrong?
I don't have enough information to help you. You need to actively search for communities to have them show up in the communities page. I will admit it's not the best experience in the world but that's federation. It's a "pull" system, not a "broadcast" one.
In my experience so far, it only adds the exact subscribed communities to your instance's "all" feed. I've started to interpret "all" to mean "all of my instance's users' subscribed communities". At least, this is how mine is working.