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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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

That's how federation is supposed to work. If one user searches content, you get it once. If a user of your instance subscribes to a community, you get updates for that community.

The point is to reduce load on your instance by not federating content that nobody on your instance needs.

It's based on a flawed understanding of how communities work, specifically that reddit-style forums only work well when you have huge communities that everyone sibscribes to. So, most instances end up with most content anyway.

Also, keep in mind, all conent that has been federated to your instance is on your srver and thus legally your responsibility. If there's illegal content on there, you are liable if you don't delete it.