Running test instances in a closed federation [GENERAL DISCUSSION]

Running Test Instances

The question has come up of running a test instance under a domain such that it could federate with other instances over the internet.

See, eg, MxRemy’s comment and the thread that follows: https://lemmy.ml/comment/7984848

We don’t want to pollute the network

The issue is that we might “pollute” the federation network with our instances that won’t do much and are likely to be short-lived or intermittent. If you don’t know, managing how a lemmy instance reacts to other instances that have gone silent or failed to reply/receive a request is a thing. AFAIU, the general idea is you don’t want to give up on an instance … timeouts and downtimes happen … but how do you know when to actually just give up? Most lemmy instances are likely still pinging instances/domains that went dark ages ago.

Our own closed/local federation

A work around though could be to run our test instances in “allowlist federation” mode. IE, they only federate with specified domains.

See the docs on this: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html?highlight=allowlist#federation

Should there be interest in this … we could have a simple list of domains here (linked in the sidebar too) from people running their test instance and eager to poke and prod federation. When you setup your own test instance, you can then just run in allowlist mode and copy the list from here.

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