I’m hopefully finishing up my first Lemmy installation through Ansible and have now enabled federation but think there are issues.

What’s working:

  • See instances showing up in the instances list
  • Searching across federated sites works

What’s not working:

  • When trying to subscribe to communities on other sites, I see “subscribe pending” - I found this Github issue which points to troubleshooting with CURL commands - they should return valid JSON and instead return nothing.
  • Posted to other communities doesn’t seem to go through - I’m guessing the same problem.

As far as I can tell, this is probably an nginx configuration problem. Is that the case, and what’s the best way to tackle that given the Ansible setup?

Thank you!

  • worldcitizen101OPEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    After some digging, I found the nginx config in the lemmy-ansible file structure: templates > nginx.config

    However, this is highly abstracted because it’s part of the Ansible install. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t edit it.

    One possible clue - so far, I’ve been enabling federation from the UI. There’s a bit in the configuration documentation that says that the lemmy.jhson needs to be updated with a federation block: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.html

    I don’t have this file in the lemmy-ansible directory.

    I also tried troubleshooting the federation setup again after reinstalling the instance from scratch.

    All four CURL commands now return proper JSON:

    Would this be a better question for the Ansible Github?

    • worldcitizen101OPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Weirdly enough, it works correctly after a reinstall. Here’s what I did, if it helps anyone:

      1. Delete the virtual server at Hetzner
      2. Create a new virtual server
      3. Ensure SSH still works
      4. Run the Ansible playlist
      5. Open the site and configure the new Lemmy instance
      6. Do not disable federation
      7. Create a new community and initial comment, run the curl commands noted above (I can’t see this being valuable except as a confirmation that everything is working)
      8. Block lemmygrad.ml and enable federation debugging
      9. Search for a community on another server (I used !fountainpens@sopuli.xyz), open it up, then subscribe

      I’m hesitant about a solution that involves reinstalling, but I’m new enough at managing virtual environments that I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.