[Meta] We Are Now Federated!

Just a quick heads-up that I federated our server with Lemmy.ml, which is the "big" Lemmy server. What that means is that people who have accounts on the main Lemmy instance, Lemmy.ml, can find and join our community, so it's possible we may see some newbies come in. It also means that you can use your account here to join communities on Lemmy.ml.

I'm being very careful with this at first because I don't want to deal with a lot of spam. I reserve the right to turn it off if spam becomes a problem. But hopefully it won't, and I'll be able to deal with whatever comes along easily enough. Use that downvote and report button!

At first this is going to be clunky, because our server is still working on federating with theirs. So, if you were to look at a conversation over at Lemmy.ml right now, it would look like a ghost town. But that's just because our server is in the early phases of federating with them. As time goes on, it will become seamless.

Also, there's no good way for us to search for communities on Lemmy.ml right now, because we are in the early stages of federation and no one has joined those communities yet. The only way to do so right now is to go to https://lemmy.ml, click Communities at the top, and search or browse. You can then come back here to your account, click the magnifying glass symbol on the top, type into search:

!communityname@lemmy.ml

and you'll be able to join it. Again, at first it may seem like there are not a lot of posts, but this is because we are still in this early federation period.

This is also a good moment to plug !ws_server_announce!ws_server_announce, where I will normally post announcements such as these, and !ws_server_discussion!ws_server_discussion, which is what it sounds like, a place to discuss anything involving the server and its administration. Please feel free to join both of those if that interests you.

Thanks again for being part of this experiment!