[Help] New self-hosted instance not crawling communities - eviltoast

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

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com
    6·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • NotNotMike@notnotlemmy.comOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yep you’re right. And I’ve discovered that, in order to see posts from a community, at least one user in your instance needs to be subscribed to a community to view it.

      Would be nice if someday the browse functionality provided by some sites was integrated into Lemmy but for now I had to go through and manually subscribe to a bunch of things.

      I’d use a scraper but there’s a lot of content I don’t care to see right now, and I’m assuming subscribing comes with a small storage cost, so may as well avoid it for now