After almost a year of hard work implementing ActivityPub support on Lemmy, it is finally done! Anything that works here on dev.lemmy.ml, also works over federation between different instances (with one notable exception, community mods have to be on the same instance as the community for now).
Before we consider federation ready for production, some more testing is needed. And that’s where you come in: go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like:
- post, comment and vote
- delete and restore posts/comments
- send private messages
- create communities, remove/restore posts and ban/unban users
- setup your own lemmy instance, and federate with enterprise.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml
If you notice any bugs, please report them on Github, as comments on this post, or in our Dev Chat on Matrix. Please keep in mind that our code of conduct also applies to the test instances.
The more you test, the sooner we will feel confident to enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml. Happy testing!
You need to make a new account on there (each instance is completely independent as far as logins are concerned).
So why not test federation on lemmy.ml, with the account I already have? I guess federation features are only activated on enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml so far? That wasn’t clear to me.
Yes, we want to test the federation more, cause if something goes wrong, we can easily wipe the data on those test instances and start from zero. Once we enable federation here, there’s no going back.
Hmmm, so how does that work with federating with instances with different moderation policies, especially around banning? I’m thinking about setting up an instance to have a home for Reddit’s /r/moderatepolitics in the Fediverse. We would presumably want to federate with lemmy.ml, but it’s unclear to me whether we would get a chilly reception given the more lefty inclination of the Lemmy community.
We havent discussed that so far, but I see lemmy.ml federating with any instance that follows our code of conduct (or something to the same effect). Also, the mod tools in Lemmy are really primitive so far, and for the beginning we are only going to federate with a small number of manually approved instances. Once mod tools get better, we can think about opening it up more.
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Or wait, you mean they are completely independent? Of course that works, lemmy.ml isnt referenced anywhere in the federation code. So you can make arbitrary networks between instances.
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Activitypub is a protocol, think of it like HTTP between servers. And then forgot that comparison, because Activitypub runs on top of HTTP and is completely different.
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I have no idea about digitalocean, but in fact we are thinking about offering managed Lemmy instances ourselves in the future.
My https://fanonwave.ml test instance is digitalocean, I just used the ansible deploy install and it worked great.
You mean A - B - C with no connection between A and C? I think it should work fine in theory, but no clue how it would go in praxis. Definitely needs testing.
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No we havent thought about that, but feel free to open an issue.