Yeah, that (probably) isn’t a DNS resolution problem. “Failed to resolve actor” basically means it was trying to look up the actor for the community (a community is just a Group in ActivityPub parlance, so it does a WebFinger request to https://lemmy.nrd.li/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Aadmin_blog%40lemmy.nrd.li in this case to find that Group), and that request is failing. It could be some sort of network issue, I think I’ve seen someone with a similar issue due to missing their ca certs.

Make sure you are doing all of your debugging from inside the lemmy container not just the server if you’re using containers.

edit: Also, I had to individually load your comment with a search so I could reply, so .ml is running pretty far behind in terms of federation…

Right, I’ve moved to my PC and your post makes more sense now.

It seems like the problem section of your logs is couldnt_find_object: error decoding response body: missing field properties at line 1 column 158. I’m thinking it may have something to do with your ngnix.conf because it might be implying that it can’t see anything at all, rather than just a missing field property.

I’ve shared my nginx.conf below in the hope that, by comparison you can get your instance to federate. (This is from my instance that is federating fully and correctly).

worker_processes auto;
events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
    upstream lemmy {
        # this needs to map to the lemmy (server) docker service hostname
        server "lemmy:8536";
    }
    upstream lemmy-ui {
        # this needs to map to the lemmy-ui docker service hostname
        server "lemmy-ui:1234";
    }

    server {
        # this is the port inside docker, not the public one yet
        listen 1236;
        listen 8536;
        # change if needed, this is facing the public web
        server_name localhost;
        server_tokens off;

        gzip on;
        gzip_types text/css application/javascript image/svg+xml;
        gzip_vary on;

        # Upload limit, relevant for pictrs
        client_max_body_size 20M;

        add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
        add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
        add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";

        # frontend general requests
        location / {
            # distinguish between ui requests and backend
            # don't change lemmy-ui or lemmy here, they refer to the upstream definitions on top
            set $proxpass "http://lemmy-ui";

            if ($http_accept = "application/activity+json") {
              set $proxpass "http://lemmy";
            }
            if ($http_accept = "application/ld+json; profile=\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\"") {
              set $proxpass "http://lemmy";
            }
            if ($request_method = POST) {
              set $proxpass "http://lemmy";
            }
            proxy_pass $proxpass;

            rewrite ^(.+)/+$ $1 permanent;
            # Send actual client IP upstream
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        }

        # backend
        location ~ ^/(api|pictrs|feeds|nodeinfo|.well-known) {
            proxy_pass "http://lemmy";
            # proxy common stuff
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

            # Send actual client IP upstream
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        }
    }
}

Thank you for the help so far! Another user successfully sent me a message so it seems some things are working. I do have federation enabled in settings (see image)

Do I need to specifically list all the instances I want to federate with? That seems counter intuitive as by default I’d like to federate with all instances and just block the ones that give me a headache.

My lemmy.hjson looks like this:

{
  database: {
    password: "NOT REAL PASSWD"
  }
  # replace with your domain
  hostname: discuss.petersanchez.com
  bind: "127.0.0.1"
  federation: {
    enabled: true
  }
  # remove this block if you don't require image hosting
  pictrs: {
    url: "http://localhost:8080/"
  }
}

I don’t even know what other options are available for this file. I can’t seem to find any docs for it. Let me know if something should be added/removed/changed.

DNS seems OK on the system when trying to resolve all the given communities from a server shell. I know ActivityPub isn’t for the faint of heart but in my toying around with it in the past, it was straight forward enough, just different software use different fields for different purposes. So that can create confusion in federation but in this case I’m dealing with Lemmy to Lemmy so I assume it should work heh.

Oh and the 1 community I was able to actually find is on kbin.social and it says subscribe pending:

Thanks again for the help so far!