What is the current workflow of federating with other communities?
As many others here, I come from Reddit. I recently setup my own mastodon and matrix instances so the complexity required to federate with other instances on Lemmy surprised me. Am I missing something?
When federating with other communities I have to manually add them to an allowlist. Why is there no option to federate with all available communities by default? If I don’t like a particular community, I could block it.
You should be able to federate with all available communities by default.
The trick is that your instance will not pull in all communities by default. Once 1 person subscribes to a community (a bit tricky for the first time, see here), all users on your instance will start seeing that community in their “All” feeds.
You might slightly misunderstand how federation works. On Mastodon someone on your instance must follow someone on a remote instance to get their posts pushed to your instance. Same with Lemmy, someone on your instance must follow a remote community to get posts & comments. Since you’re on a single user instance (like me) we don’t see anything we don’t follow/subscribe…
Once you add things to the AllowList, only things in the AllowList federate. You probably want to use empty AllowList + populate BlockList as needed.