I just realized that it might not be a technical issue that I can’t subscribe to any kbin.social magazines from my one-person lemmy instance but that I might not be on the whitelist.
Every time I try to subscribe to any magazine I get “Subscription Pending”. First I thought it was some technical issue, cloudflare, server overloaded, etc. especially because I had similar issues with lemmy instances.
Today I updated to lemmy 0.18.0 and all the lemmy servers started letting me subscribe, but not /kbin but perhaps there is something incompatible. But I found threads about people subscribing to kbin from lemmy successfully. And then I was reading https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/93050/How-do-I-request-federation and then it dawned to me that I might just either not be on a whitelist or even worse on a black list.
How is it supposed to work?
Is this the reason why my single-user instance can’t subscribe to any https://kbin.social magazine? I’m not even getting an error, just “Subscription Pending”. That sounds kind of broken and different to how Mastodon is dealing with that issue.
Do I somewhere need to apply to be able to subscribe to any /kbin magazines? If so where do I do that? Is there a email I can sent my application to? Or is the idea that if you have a single user instance you create a new user on every instance to find some meta-magazine where you can ask to be able to subscribe to a magazine on that instance?
Or are small instances not part of the design?
I also see that my comments in threads of other instances which kbin federates with don’t show up here either, which is understandable if my instance is banned.
@jeena if you deployed your instance using the Ansible method, you may be facing the same issue described here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106
The solution, which I applied to my instance and confirm it works, is described in one of the comments:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/106#issuecomment-1606222766
I applied those changes (excluding the port changes) to the nginx_internal.conf template in the lemmy-ansible playbook, ran the playbook again and I can now subscribe to Kbin magazines from my Lemmy instance. There’s still the weird quirk of having to click the Subscribe button a couple of times (or maybe clicking and refreshing the page) to make sure you’re subscribed correctly.