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
Things don’t get backfilled, so until a new action happens on an old post/comment/etc they won’t show up on your instance. New things should make their way in eventually though.
Taking the link of a specific post/comment from the community instance and searching for it from your instance should populate it on your instance, just like you probably had to do to get this community to show up so you could subscribe/post at all.
There are backfill tools/scripts, but unless you really want old posts I wouldn’t use them. It unnecessarily increases the load on already struggling popular/overloaded instances like lemmy.world.