How can I get my Lemmy instance federated with other instances?

https://lemmy.world/post/1415551

How can I get my Lemmy instance federated with other instances? - Lemmy.world

I’ve had a Lemmy instance running at lemmy.fdr8.us [http://lemmy.fdr8.us] for a few days now. I read that federating is enabled by default but it can take some time, but so far the only instance I appear to be federated with is Lemmy.ml [http://Lemmy.ml]. What can I do to get my instance federated with other Lemmy instances?

A lemmy instance won’t start federating until a user has searched for and subscribed to a particular community. So, taking a peek at your instance it looks like you’ve only subscribed to one local “Announcements” community.

This is where things need to get a little creative. On my instance I have an account whose sole purpose is to search for and subscribe to interesting communities to fill up my “All” tab. I then use my main account to focus on the communities that I want to interact with regularly. I wrote a little script to automate that, but it’s still pretty simple to do manually.

I sort of just got it working. I searched and found a thread where someone said to try entering the full URL. I pasted in the https:// url from a community page on Lemmy.world and it worked. I wonder if that might clue anyone in to what is wrong with my setup. At least I can federate with more instances now though. Woot! Thanks for the help!