this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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[SOLVED] Why is my Lemmy instance not finding other instances' communities? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by sdg to c/selfhosted
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Edit: YOOOOOOOO YOU CAN EDIT TITLES HERE

Anyway, you have to first search for the community in the format [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). It doesn't show up the first time but if you mash Enter for a while it will...

Also, this FAQ linked by @[email protected] 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/[email protected] 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 ([email protected] 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)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Things in the fediverse can be pretty fractured. Many instances block lemmygrad. Kbin has not been federating right because it is buggy, a newish feature for it, and/or under insane load. About 2 hours ago beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

Similar things happened during the mastodon boom. Lots of federation/blocking drama between various instances. A lot of drama about "free speech" instances and NSFW in particular, IIRC. A lot of the GNU Social side of the fediverse leaned heavily into the "free speech" aspect, which was jarring for some new users/servers admins to mastodon.

Honestly, your best option is to selfhost or find a small instance with some sort of non-open admission policy. Even that can make things hard as some instances can have a restrictive federation policy (only federating to explicitly allowed instances), though I don't think that is a very popular at the moment. If spammers start spinning up their own servers instead of making accounts on open servers that may start happening.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the main reason I'm here - I realized that with an account on lemmy.world or something some admin somewhere could just unilaterally decide to defederate some major server and I wouldn't be able to get to half the communities I like anymore. And lo and behold, beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world while I was setting this up.

I always thought this mechanic would drive a lot of people away from the fediverse, but mastodon still seems to be pretty active after the mass migrations from Tumblr and Twitter so what do I know?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Re. Mastodon: Insular communities gonna insulate. Defederation has collateral damage, but among some communities that is acceptable because they view intolerance and the toleration of intolerance as close enough to warrant blanket handling. (See that "Nazi bar" story that's often cited)

Re. Lemmy: I think we will see much of the same. Lemmy is (IMO) in a slightly more immature state than Mastodon was when it had one of its early booms (when I ran an instance briefly). Especially w/r/t mod tools and stuff, which is part of why things are fragmenting at the moment.

I want my instance to run "under the radar" for the most part. Personally I'd rather leave things up to individuals to decide what they do or don't want to see. For example, if you enable NSFW content and browse "all" posts, don't be surprised if there is NSFW content there. Or content you don't agree with. But, if you borrow my car with my company logo on it (use my instance) to go to someone else's house (some community on another instance) and piss in their cornflakes (break that community's rules) I am not going to let you keep borrowing my car (kick you off my instance). And on the communities fully hosted on the instance itself I want them to generally be welcoming to others, which includes showing people who are not welcoming the door.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh interesting. I could selfhost and then have access to any of the instances? Would I be able to access an instance that's defederated? Seems like Beehaw has a ton of activity and now it's defederating. It's almost sus bc if I was trying to discredit the fediverse and Lemmy in general, I would get as many people on my instance as possible and then cut it off completely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It depends. If they are choosing only to defederate specific instances, yes. If they are choosing only to federate with specific instances that leaves it up to you getting on the list by talking to those instance admins or something. If they are not federating at all then of course you're just out of luck.

Re. Beehaw: It's impossible to guess their intentions at this point. They appear to be (and say they are) only defederating specific instances and they are doing so for specific reasons. As I said to someone else talking about this just as it happened:

(Originally comparing this to some of the instance blocking that happened back when I ran a Mastodon server)

Insular communities gonna insulate. Defederation has collateral damage, but among some communities that is acceptable because they view intolerance and the toleration of intolerance as close enough to warrant blanket handling. (See that “Nazi bar” story that’s often cited)

(Then talking about how that relates to Lemmy)

IMO moderation necessarily has to exist two places in a federated environement. Yes, the community (hosting instance) always has to do moderation, but so does the federating instance. If the federating instance does not have policies in place to handle bad actors who go to other servers and break their rules and it is a large enough problem this action could make sense even well into the future. Unfortunately Lemmy is in a quite early state so I don’t think the tooling to do such work well even really exists. Something like only allowing confirmed posters from federated instance[s] or requiring someone to be subscribed for an amount of time before posting could do wonders. Yes, this is the nuclear option, but their choices at the moment are a butter knife or a nuke.

I sincerely hope this gets better as Lemmy matures.