Wanted to cross post this here in case someone has had this issue before. Been dealing with this for a couple of days now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/94985

I set up my own personal Lemmy instance yesterday and everything seems to be up and running. I installed it on Docker with SSL enabled on a Digital Ocean droplet.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is federated search. I can search local communities, but no matter what I do I can’t get it to recognize other instances. I’ve tried:

• Searching with the bang prefix (ie, !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml)
• Searching with the whole URL (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support)
• Keywords (“lemmy support”)

And nothing shows up. I’ve tried the same search terms multiple times over the past day or so and nothing is changing. My instance has federation and federation debugging enabled (although I can’t figure out where the federation debugging outputs yet, because nothing in console log changes), and as far as I can tell there are no errors in the Docker logs that could point me in a specific direction. Where can I start looking to properly debug this?

EDIT: I needed to expose my lemmy backend to the proxy network. This answer here helped me get to the solution. Thanks so much! https://lemmy.world/comment/150173