I'm trying to start my own lemmy instance, and reading through the documentation at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html it looks like we need to manually search for just about everything that can be found on other lemmy instances.

It works. I'm able to search for communities/comments/posts and then my instance will load only that community/comment chain/post and only after I've searched it. No updates.

Is this what we're supposed to be doing? Seems pretty tedious to have someone that's supposed to go to other instances and then search for all of their content on my instance in order to federate with it.

I have a feeling there is an easier way, but I'm legitimately not seeing it.

Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they'll get to see.

I can write a crawler to automate all of this, but I'd rather not unless it's completely necessary.

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[–] FrostyTrichs@crazypeople.online 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

IIRC the way it works is by PMing you the API key to get started and you're failing at that point. Are you sure your instance is federating? I don't know anything about how fediseer works on the backend but if it's not able to send you a PM that suggests you might not be federating at all or maybe you're running a whitelist or something? I'd start investigating if your instance is reachable from other instances and if you're able to send yourself a PM from another instance.

[–] uhdeuidheuidhed@thelemmy.club 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

You're probably right.

I'm trying to look up a user on my instance from another insance with theirinstance.com/u/myuser@myinstance.com and it's not working.

I'm not sure what could be causing this, it could be something simple like the previous issue I had earlier with the domain name. I'm going to go through my settings and try to figure this one out, but I'm still kind of new to all of this so it may take some time.

[–] FrostyTrichs@crazypeople.online 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Good luck mate. It's a little intimidating at first but it usually boils down to something simple. A slight misconfiguration or minor syntax error can cause pretty significant issues. You might have a look at your logs or try running in debug mode to see if anything jumps out at you.

EDIT: Do you have federation enabled in the admin panel? Also probably worth making sure you DON'T have private instance checked.

federation