I’m considering running my own Lemmy instance just for myself and maybe a few friends, but before I go to the trouble I want to make sure I don’t get into a place where I’ve put the instance up but no one will federate with me because I’m too small to be worth it and they’re overwhelmed by federation requests.
Those of you who’ve set up an instance, was this a problem? Do the big servers have explicit allowlists, or do they tend to blocklist instead?
I’ve docker-compose up’d Lemmy this afternoon and was able to subscribe to almost all communities I’m interested in. lemmy.ml is a bit wobbly today so it needs several tries until a subscription sticks. And federotica.com doesn’t properly confirm my subscription requests it seems. But apart from those issues, all other hosts happily let me subscribe to their communities.
Just make sure your Lemmy instance is reachable via HTTPS and has a valid certificate (e.g. Let’s Encrypt) and it should work.