That makes sense, thank you for the insight. Also it’s a good sign that this post and the comments are federated correctly from my instance to lemmy.ml, kbin.social and your own instance as well. Very cool to see this in action.

I’ll try that, thank you for the suggestion. You’ve also helped me confirm that my instance is federating correctly with lemmy.ml, kbin.social and your own instance as well, so I think we’re off to a good start.

I see. I’ve a had a similar experience with some posts from beehaw.org and lemmy.world, but of course those are huge instances already and growing quickly.

As if these two needed their egos stroked even more. I’ll never understand why billionaires need so much attention, and why on earth we give it to them.

Kim’s Caravan by Courtney Barnett is one of my favorites.

I just upgraded via Ansible and the only issue I ran into is that on 0.18.0 you can’t enable Federation and Private Instance at the same time. I had both enabled on 0.17.4 and when I upgraded, the Lemmy docker wouldn’t start because both options can’t be enabled together anymore. I had to disable Private Instance directly on the database to get my instance up and running again.

Thankfully the error was very explicit:

lemmy_1 | Error: LemmyError { message: Some("Cannot have both private instance and federation enabled."), inner: Cannot have both private instance and federation enabled., context: SpanTrace [] }

ncgnzlcl_lemmy_1 exited with code 1

With both options enabled, my instance operated as expected on 0.17.4: there was no anonymous access to anything, but once logged in you could subscribe to communities from any public instances. They don’t seem incompatible at all, and my posts and comments were federated correctly outside of my instance.

At least on 0.17.4, with Private Instance and Federation enabled, the comments and posts I made to remote communities were federated correctly to other instances. The change seems very intentional, as shown by the error message I got after I upgraded:

lemmy_1 | Error: LemmyError { message: Some("Cannot have both private instance and federation enabled."), inner: Cannot have both private instance and federation enabled., context: SpanTrace [] }

ncgnzlcl_lemmy_1 exited with code 1

I guess this comment was originally a response to a different problem, but in my case it wasn’t a “hack” - there was no problem with enabling federation on a private instance, and it worked as expected. I thought of a “private instance” as “can’t see it unless you log in, but federates exactly like a public instance would”, and that’s exactly how it worked in 0.17.4, but I understand if, in principle, it wasn’t supposed to work like that. Again, there was no need to hack anything on my end, it just worked.

I see, thank you for the insight. According to this comment, after an instance on 0.18.0 is running one can still set it to private with federation enabled, so it seems this check is only preventing the instance from starting in that state.