Well all. Thanks for the help. I manually built 0.18.0 and so far, it seems to be working as expected. I can find communities and subscribe to them OK, etc. Thanks for the help!

Thanks for confirming. I am running lemmy from Supervisord and not using any containers. I’m debugging via it’s log output. This is so strange as I can’t really see anything else wrong or missing from nginx config.

Are you running 0.18.0? I ask because I notice in lemmy-ansible now the config is different and there seems to be no proxy-ing for the UI, just the backend. Not quite sure how that is supposed to work now. I think I read that 0.18.0 has some changes from web socket to API calls but not sure if that means the UI is totally bypassed now?

Thank you. Yea, I’ve compared with quite a few nginx.conf’s now and I’m not quite sure what the issue could be with my nginx config. Trying the community on your instance, I get this error:

couldnt_find_community: Failed to resolve actor for admin_blog@lemmy.nrd.li

I assume this is not DNS related because I can resolve lemmy.nrd.li without issue from the server where lemmy is running.

Thank you for sharing your config. Mine was nearly exactly identical. I updated some of the headers (yours were slightly different than mine) but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference. I will try enabling federation debug and see what the logs show

Ah yea, I also bastardized it. This is nginx.conf though, I was referring to the lemmy.hjson file. I am not sure of all the options available there haha.

Thanks for the answer! I have registration closed (it’s just a personal instance).

I was able to get the kbin subscription to status pending. Trying the lemmy.ca community gets this in the logs

2023-07-03T19:17:43.357158Z  WARN Error encountered while processing the incoming HTTP request: lemmy_server::root_span_builder: couldnt_find_community: error decoding response body: missing field `properties` at line 1 column 166
   0: lemmy_apub::fetcher::resolve_actor_identifier
             at /home/lemmy/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/lemmy_apub-0.17.4/src/fetcher/mod.rs:16
   1: lemmy_apub::api::read_community::perform
           with self=GetCommunity { id: None, name: Some("nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca"), auth: Some(Sensitive) }
             at /home/lemmy/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/lemmy_apub-0.17.4/src/api/read_community.rs:30
   2: lemmy_server::root_span_builder::HTTP request
           with http.method=GET http.scheme="http" http.host=discuss.petersanchez.com http.target=/api/v3/community otel.kind="server" request_id=8cef1a93-33c3-4197-89b9-4d709b0e9b10 http.status_code=400 otel.status_code="OK"
             at /home/lemmy/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/lemmy_server-0.17.4/src/root_span_builder.rs:16
LemmyError { message: Some("couldnt_find_community"), inner: error decoding response body: missing field `properties` at line 1 column 166

Caused by:
    missing field `properties` at line 1 column 166, context: "SpanTrace" }

I think I’ll try updating to latest in main and see what happens.

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!

Sorry. Just trying to bump here to hopefully get some help. Thanks!

Where did you find that new lemmy.conf file? I have no idea what options are even available in that config. I saw a limited one in lemmy-ansible but I know for sure there is more than what’s in there as an option.

I just set up from scratch on FreeBSD and had that issue at first as well. Turns out the instructions on the website could use some love as the ansible nginx configs were out of date. I manually updated my nginx config to match the blocks for UI and BE in the nginx_internal.conf and that seemed to resolve my registration issues.

Also make sure you’re front end version is the same as your backend. I also made that mistake.

Yes, I figured this out yesterday. I removed superuser once the migrations ran and now the system starts up successfully. Thank you for the answer!