this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Hi. I'm new to federation and would like to set up my own instance.

I'm able to get a lemmy website up and running, but for some reason I can't see or search for other instances.

The only thing that I'm able to connect to, for some reason, is the technology community for lemmy.world. Even that loads improperly though as the posts only seemed to load once and aren't getting any updates. There are also no comments and my subscription to the community remains pending.

Trying to connect to the community directly using myinstance.com/c/othercommunity@otherinstance does not work. It returns an error page that says "The server returned this error: Error".

Does anyone know what could be causing this, or a possible fix?

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[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You have to subscribe to a community, otherwise you're not getting any updates. If no one on your instance subscribes, you get no updates. Try setting up a bot account and make it subscribe to a bunch of communities.

For example using https://lemmy-federate.com/.

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 6 points 2 days ago

You have to subscribe to a community

It sounds like they did think that far, but that has its own problems for them.

my subscription to the community remains pending

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Is your instance reachable from the internet? You might as well post the URL because as soon as you properly use it it will be public anyways.