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By default, your instance will only know about communities on that instance and communities that users of that instance have intentionally subscribed to. Unfortunately, this causes problems for users of smaller instances unless the instance admins are running a federation helper bot, which basically scans remote instances for communities and adds them to the instance.
I found this out the hard way when I first tried Lemmy, since I picked a tiny instance due to the larger ones being overloaded in June. I had a hell of a time trying to subscribe to the communities for the new Lemmy apps I was trying out. I kept getting Community Not Found errors until I refreshed the page multiple times until it eventually found the community.
Most big instances federate with everyone. Those with “allowlists only” are not very common. If you want to federate with one of those instances, you’ll just have to ask the admins.
Also, this is not a support community. (But I’m not a mod so I dont care)
I was trying to find one but couldn’t so I came here, I can cross-post it if needed.
This is basically what I don’t understand, how would they federate with me if they don’t know I exist? Would I have to ask a big instance to federate with me first and then the rest would find me from there perhaps?
They don’t know you exist, but they don’t block you either. You would have to interact with the instance to be under “Linked Instances”. One way to establish a link is by finding a community on that instance you want to link by searching for them using this format:
!community@instance.tld
For example this community would be !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
You would need to manually do this for every community you want to see on your instance. If you never typed !asklemmy@lemmy.ml on your instance’s search box, your instance would never know that this community exists.
Or you can use a bot to automatially add them for you.
Wrote this awhile ago, to provide an overview of roughly how Lemmy works. Covered this question about halfway down if I remember right:
https://lemmy.world/post/583669
Perfect, thanks
This is more of a support question, related to using Lemmy. Please see the sidebar for a list of communities that offer support. Removing under rule #3.