We are happy to announce that we have finished the initial version of our ActivityPub implementation. At the moment, it can only federate a limited set of data, like communities, users and posts, but not comments or votes. So this initial version is mainly interesting for those who are familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, and those who would like to contribute to Lemmy.
These are our test instances, Be aware that they are not permanent, and we might wipe the data at any time. Federation uses a whitelist for now, until we are confident that the implementation is secure.
If you are interested in contributing to the development, check out this issue and the dev instructions. Please use the issue tracker to report bugs, so that we can keep everything organized.
We also want to give a huge thanks to Aode, whose ActivityStreams library and advice have helped us immensely.
If you like what we are doing, please consider donating towards Lemmy development. Besides Liberapay and Patreon, we are also on OpenCollective now. Donations are a big help for us, because they allow us to spend more time to work on Lemmy, instead of selling our labour to a company just to pay for rent and other necessities.
Posts only get federated if someone is subscribed to the community where they were made. You can force fetch a post, community or user by entering its url in the search on another instance. I did that and now the post is visible on all instances.
Is there a reason for not federating posts made before the user subscribes?
Well that would mean fetching all the posts, comments, users and communities from all instances we know about, and thats a lot of data. Chances are that the local users dont even care about that, and if they do, they can always trigger a manual fetch.
Mastodon works in the same way. One problem is that small instances dont see much content, but that can be solved with relays.