I can’t get email working and I federation doesn’t seem to work either, but it’s up!
I created an instance for the town I live in as the main form of communication is a fb page. Once I get these issues fixed I will promote it and hopefully get people using it.
you need to subscribe to other communities from your home instance before you see anything. The federation only syncs what your users subscribe to, this gives your more control over your content, helps prevent DoS style attacks and allows the network to grow much larger than if we tried to sync everything all the time.
I haven’t figured out how to do that. For example, if I put the url for this thread into the search bar on my instance it says there are 0 results.
Multiple ways to skin the cat, you can use community names as well, there are also multiple lookup sites I keep a list of resources that can help you find things to sub to.
Also you need to make sure you use the link from the instance the thread is on if you use the link for any other instance it won’t work.