I’m trying to start my own lemmy instance, and reading through the documentation at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html it looks like we need to manually search for just about everything that can be found on other lemmy instances.

It works. I’m able to search for communities/comments/posts and then my instance will load only that community/comment chain/post and only after I’ve searched it. No updates.

Is this what we’re supposed to be doing? Seems pretty tedious to have someone that’s supposed to go to other instances and then search for all of their content on my instance in order to federate with it.

I have a feeling there is an easier way, but I’m legitimately not seeing it.

Right now, it looks like the only way users on my instance will get to see content from other instances is if I manually search for just about everything they’ll get to see.

I can write a crawler to automate all of this, but I’d rather not unless it’s completely necessary.