After almost a year of hard work implementing ActivityPub support on Lemmy, it is finally done! Anything that works here on dev.lemmy.ml, also works over federation between different instances (with one notable exception, community mods have to be on the same instance as the community for now).
Before we consider federation ready for production, some more testing is needed. And that’s where you come in: go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like:
- post, comment and vote
- delete and restore posts/comments
- send private messages
- create communities, remove/restore posts and ban/unban users
- setup your own lemmy instance, and federate with enterprise.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml
If you notice any bugs, please report them on Github, as comments on this post, or in our Dev Chat on Matrix. Please keep in mind that our code of conduct also applies to the test instances.
The more you test, the sooner we will feel confident to enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml. Happy testing!
Congratulations to the dev team! You guys rock. I love the names of the test instances too. :)
Thanks :)
We have released a new lemmy version (v0.8.7), which fixes all the federation issues reported so far. The test instances are already updated, so give it another try :)
Is there any way that one day Lemmy could work with Yunohost? It would likely be the fastest way to get more servers up and running for non-technical users. It makes setting up services almost a point and click affair once the initial Yunohost server is installed.
No idea, best ask them. We are busy with development and dont have the time to package Lemmy for all kinds of distros.
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Thanks, I opened some issues for these problems: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues
The last problem with federation between DS9 and Enterprise is because Enterprise has DS9 on the blocklist, so they cant federate. I think the problem here is that they used to federate before we enabled the blocklist, so you can still see some communities or posts from DS9 on Enterprise.
Thanks for these, I’m getting to work on some of them now.
Now that federation is done. Is the development of interacting with other federated instances like mastodon and peertube is also done or theres some more work there .
No, this is only federation between Lemmy instances. Federation with other software is a lot more difficult, and will take quite some time.
This could become quite interesting … if everything works integration with Mastodon , Plume , etc. should work seamlessly … maybe also with Identi.ca and GNU social …
Federation with Mastodon would be interesting. Unsure how it would work though, the posting styles are completely different.
How are instance backups affected by federation? I assume no difference, but I just want to be sure.
Correct, no difference at all.
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Go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like: - post, comment and vote
Tbh, I don’t even understand how it’s supposed to work. If I open enterprise.lemmy.ml, it (unsurprisingly) doesn’t accept my login data from lemmy.ml. How can I post, comment, and vote?
You need to make a new account on there (each instance is completely independent as far as logins are concerned).
So why not test federation on lemmy.ml, with the account I already have? I guess federation features are only activated on enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml so far? That wasn’t clear to me.
Yes, we want to test the federation more, cause if something goes wrong, we can easily wipe the data on those test instances and start from zero. Once we enable federation here, there’s no going back.
Hmmm, so how does that work with federating with instances with different moderation policies, especially around banning? I’m thinking about setting up an instance to have a home for Reddit’s /r/moderatepolitics in the Fediverse. We would presumably want to federate with lemmy.ml, but it’s unclear to me whether we would get a chilly reception given the more lefty inclination of the Lemmy community.
We havent discussed that so far, but I see lemmy.ml federating with any instance that follows our code of conduct (or something to the same effect). Also, the mod tools in Lemmy are really primitive so far, and for the beginning we are only going to federate with a small number of manually approved instances. Once mod tools get better, we can think about opening it up more.
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Activitypub is a protocol, think of it like HTTP between servers. And then forgot that comparison, because Activitypub runs on top of HTTP and is completely different.
You mean A - B - C with no connection between A and C? I think it should work fine in theory, but no clue how it would go in praxis. Definitely needs testing.
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No we havent thought about that, but feel free to open an issue.
A noob question: how can I subscribe to a remote community? Tried to type something like
!testcom@ds9.lemmy.mlin the search on enterprise.lemmy.ml, but the search found nothing.Enterprise has ds9 blocked, to test that out. DS9 is wide open, and voyager has them both in allowlist.
Works now! Found a bug - seems my display name isn’t federated, it shows just
@pioneer@voyager.lemmy.ml.Hrm… I coulda swore we had that worked out. It might need to wait a day, and then you make another comment to do a user re-fetch, we don’t push user details unfortunately.
Where exactly?
Did you change your displayname after that post was federated? In that case its expected, because Lemmy only refetches user profiles every 24 hours at most.
Yes, exactly. Ok great, so I’ll check in 24 hours then, thanks.
It is only refetched if some federated action is happening after that interval, so you will have to do something like vote, or create/update a post or comment to trigger the refetch.
Another bug - when clicking on the full nickname
@pioneer@voyager.lemmy.mlhere - https://ds9.lemmy.ml/user/44, it redirects me to the incorrect addresshttps://ds9.lemmy.ml/user/https://voyager.lemmy.ml/u/pioneer.I just fixed this now.
Works now, thanks!
I’ll add this as a bug too.
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