Most of the servers running lemmy have federation enabled and open (as you can see, I'm one of those self-hosted instances) and you can just interact with them. Some do have federation locked down, but that's the minority
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Do you need a domain for a selfhosted instance? That sounds like something I would like to try but I've never opened anything selfhosted up to the internet
Yeah you do, IPs don't work afaik and even if they did, many Fediverse servers don't support them so your compatibility would be abysmal
You can pretty much just start adding other instances. Most of them will federate with all comers, and manually ban any instances from federation that cause trouble.
And you don't exactly add the instances. Someone on one server subscribes to a community on the other, and the instances talk to each other to make that happen.