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)