Well, I have an instance running. At startup it outputs federation enabled, host is redacted, but I don’t see anything when looking at all. I can’t search for other instance communities. I thought I would be able to use my local instance to browse other instance/communities and post there from my instance. Is that not how this works? Did I miss a step setting it up?
Some more details:
Any search I do results in a timeout error. This is from the lemmy logs.
In all my years of software development and testing, I’ve never seen an HTTP status code 101… 101: switching protocols
UPDATE: it’s fixed!
Thanks to @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev who pointed me in the right direction, and thank you everyone who contributed to this post in the comments with suggestions and support!
Here are the steps:
add a new network interface
docker network create lemmyexternal
connect the lemmy container (lemmy_lemmy_1, unless you renamed it)
docker network connect NETWORK_ID CONTAINER_ID
(you can get the network and container IDs with docker network ls and docker container ls)
modify the docker-compose.yml to add the new network, and link it to the lemmy service
networks:
# communication to web and clients
lemmyexternalproxy:
lemmyexternal:
# communication between lemmy services
lemmyinternal:
driver: bridge
internal: true
services:
lemmy:
image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4-rc.1
hostname: lemmy
networks:
- lemmyinternal
- lemmyexternal
save, and restart
docker-compose restart
yeah, once I added about ~5 popular communities discovery became easier. People were suggesting other communities etc. so it helps your instance know whats out there.
Well that begs the question then - if communities are “homed” on instances (although the same community can exist on two different homes as completely separate communities) and then get “subscribed” or federated to other instances through searching, how does one know what all communities exist? Short of going to, or scraping the /Communities page of each Lemmy or Kbin instance, how does one know whats available?
Clearly we need a Lemmy411 Community. :)
Be the change you want to see in the world: https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy411 TADA!
Discovery is still a challenge, but if instance admins subscribed to that it would make it easier on users.
What I think would be better would be to automatically send some kind of community digest out to other known instances once a week or something. That way if a user searches for a “music” community, they will get results from instances they may not personally know about.