Well, I have an instance running. At startup it outputs federation enabled, host is redacted, but I don't see anything when looking at all. I can't search for other instance communities. I thought I would be able to use my local instance to browse other instance/communities and post there from my instance. Is that not how this works? Did I miss a step setting it up?

Some more details: Any search I do results in a timeout error. This is from the lemmy logs.

In all my years of software development and testing, I've never seen an HTTP status code 101... 101: switching protocols

UPDATE: it's fixed!

Thanks to @pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev who pointed me in the right direction, and thank you everyone who contributed to this post in the comments with suggestions and support!

Here are the steps:

add a new network interface

docker network create lemmyexternal

connect the lemmy container (lemmy_lemmy_1, unless you renamed it)

docker network connect NETWORK_ID CONTAINER_ID

(you can get the network and container IDs with docker network ls and docker container ls)

modify the docker-compose.yml to add the new network, and link it to the lemmy service

networks:
  # communication to web and clients
  lemmyexternalproxy:
  lemmyexternal:
  # communication between lemmy services
  lemmyinternal:
    driver: bridge
    internal: true

services:
  lemmy:
    image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.4-rc.1
    hostname: lemmy
    networks:
      - lemmyinternal
      - lemmyexternal

save, and restart

docker-compose restart