What is the current workflow of federating with other communities?

As many others here, I come from Reddit. I recently setup my own mastodon and matrix instances so the complexity required to federate with other instances on Lemmy surprised me. Am I missing something?

When federating with other communities I have to manually add them to an allowlist. Why is there no option to federate with all available communities by default? If I don’t like a particular community, I could block it.

  • Barbarian@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    You should be able to federate with all available communities by default.

    The trick is that your instance will not pull in all communities by default. Once 1 person subscribes to a community (a bit tricky for the first time, see here), all users on your instance will start seeing that community in their “All” feeds.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
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    1 year ago

    You might slightly misunderstand how federation works. On Mastodon someone on your instance must follow someone on a remote instance to get their posts pushed to your instance. Same with Lemmy, someone on your instance must follow a remote community to get posts & comments. Since you’re on a single user instance (like me) we don’t see anything we don’t follow/subscribe…

  • kosmo@satl.ink
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    1 year ago

    Once you add things to the AllowList, only things in the AllowList federate. You probably want to use empty AllowList + populate BlockList as needed.