I agree it would be nice if the instances would pull in communities automatically instead of us needing to manually search for them. I guess that'll be something the Lemmy devs do something about in the future. In the meantime, I have been using this site: https://lemmyverse.net/
I also did the Ansible setup.
Are you subscribing to communities? I think searching just pulls something like 20 posts but nothing else. Everything starts getting pulled in when someone subscribes.
I also had some issues with pictures but the problems just kind of resolved themselves. Maybe try resetting the server and see what happens.
I personally agree. I'm from the U.S. but also have been an expat for over a decade. Honestly it bugs me too how much Reddit, as well as other sites, just use the U.S. as the default. The U.S. is definitely important, but it's not the center of the world.
Yes, exactly. I don't know how email spam filters work. Looking up DNS RBL, I now understand it better. I agree, something similar to that would be more elegant and effective than something like ad blocker lists.
As far as I can tell, I can already do that on Lemmy. Not sure about Kbin. My own instance is linked with 486 other instances right now and Lemmy.ml is linked with 3577. Considering those numbers, I'd think manually whitelisting all of them would be a huge pain. So admins would be faced with a dilemma: whitelist and miss the point of the "Fediverse" or blacklist and give in to playing a never ending game of Whack-a-mole.
My best guess is there will be community-run blacklists that instances can automatically subscribe to in the future, similar to ad blockers, to make this part of instance administration less of a pain.
Or self host and just use one account
Agreed with others on here about Ubuntu. I have one server that I threw a bunch of stuff on and spent many hours messing with the nginx configuration file before everything was working correctly (Nextcloud, another website, and a VoIP thing). Changing the OS won't make it any easier since the biggest hurdle is getting the configs right...
I hope it just keeps getting better from here!
Looks like you can follow communities by pasting their URLs in the search bar on Mastodon. The communities show up as if they're users, but it looks like you can follow them and I guess reply as you normally would. Like you can follow this community by searching this URL: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted