Just got my own instance up and running finally, but it doesn’t seem to be federating as expected.
I can search for and subscribe to communities, but unless I specifically search for the URL (e.g. selfhost@lemmy.ml) nothing shows up. I’m also making this post from my instance as well (to see if anything happens…)
Is this something I just need to wait a few hours to happen or is something incorrect.
Thanks in advance
Edit: Oh, and when I do subscribe to a community, I can only see new posts. It doesn’t retrieve older posts
For micro/personal server runners, I built a tool to automatically discover and add communities to your local instance :)
Do you know how much data is put onto the local device when subscribing to all these communities? Ballpark is it in the MBs? GBs?
Trying to determine whether discovering things I don’t want is worth it
My personal instance of about:
communities | persons | posts | comments | post_likes | comment_likes -------------+---------+-------+----------+------------+--------------- 568 | 103616 | 72621 | 383006 | 1906668 | 2152368takes up about 17GB of storage thus far!
You don’t get federated automatically. On your own instance you will only see posts in communities that you subscribe to. What I did was set up a “bot” user that I used to subscribe to a bunch of communities that I might find interesting when just browsing the All feed but I didn’t want in my personal Subscribed feed. There’s a few tools that will automatically subscribe a bot user on your instance to all the top communities but I found just manually going through https://lemmyverse.net/communities and clicking subscribe as that bot user worked for me.
I can only see new posts. It doesn’t retrieve older posts
This is normal. You’ll only receive new posts going forward from ActivityPub. Think of it like joining a mailing list, you’ll only receive new mails after subscribing. If you want to pull older post, you’ll have to do it manually by pasting the post (or comment) url in the search field.
