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!
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:
- curl -H “Accept: application/activity+json” https://your-instance.com/u/some-local-user
- curl -H “Accept: application/activity+json” https://your-instance.com/c/some-local-community
- curl -H “Accept: application/activity+json” https://your-instance.com/post/123 # the id of a local post
- curl -H “Accept: application/activity+json” https://your-instance.com/comment/123 # the id of a local comment
Would this be a better question for the Ansible Github?
Weirdly enough, it works correctly after a reinstall. Here’s what I did, if it helps anyone:
- Delete the virtual server at Hetzner
- Create a new virtual server
- Ensure SSH still works
- Run the Ansible playlist
- Open the site and configure the new Lemmy instance
- Do not disable federation
- 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)
- Block lemmygrad.ml and enable federation debugging
- 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.