Running Test Instances
The question has come up of running a test instance under a domain such that it could federate with other instances over the internet.
See, eg, MxRemy’s comment and the thread that follows: https://lemmy.ml/comment/7984848
We don’t want to pollute the network
The issue is that we might “pollute” the federation network with our instances that won’t do much and are likely to be short-lived or intermittent. If you don’t know, managing how a lemmy instance reacts to other instances that have gone silent or failed to reply/receive a request is a thing. AFAIU, the general idea is you don’t want to give up on an instance … timeouts and downtimes happen … but how do you know when to actually just give up? Most lemmy instances are likely still pinging instances/domains that went dark ages ago.
Our own closed/local federation
A work around though could be to run our test instances in “allowlist federation” mode. IE, they only federate with specified domains.
See the docs on this: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html?highlight=allowlist#federation
Should there be interest in this … we could have a simple list of domains here (linked in the sidebar too) from people running their test instance and eager to poke and prod federation. When you setup your own test instance, you can then just run in allowlist mode and copy the list from here.
Yea. Problem is any test instances we make here are likely to be temporary, which would annoy the admins/core devs of those instances to be repeatedly adjusting their allow lists. Maybe if something relatively medium/long term were being set up by someone that’d be different … depends on how amenable the admins or core devs are I suppose.