Enabling federation

Federation is off by default, so a fresh instance is a private, standalone blog. Turning it on lets your posts travel the fediverse and lets people on Mastodon and elsewhere follow your writers.

Order matters

Federation binds your server’s identity to your domain at startup, so:

1. Set your public domain first — in the wizard or Admin → Instance — and confirm HTTPS works at https://your-domain. Federation effectively requires HTTPS; other servers will refuse plain HTTP.

2. Turn on the Federation toggle in Admin → Instance (or set FEDERATION_ENABLED=true in .env).

3. Restart so the change takes effect:

   docker compose up -d

Confirm it is active

On the server:

curl localhost:8000/version      # -> "federation": true

Publicly:

curl https://your-domain/.well-known/nodeinfo    # -> JSON

A 404 there means federation is still off. The backend also logs Federation enabled (ActivityPub) on boot.

Finally, the real test — search for @yourusername@your-domain from a Mastodon account and follow it. You should see the follow appear, be auto-accepted, and your next published post arrive in that account’s timeline.

What turning it on changes

• Each local account becomes an ActivityPub actor with an inbox and outbox.
• Inbound Follow activities are auto-accepted (unless the account requires approval for followers).
• Publishing a post enqueues delivery to every remote follower’s inbox.
• Your instance answers WebFinger, actor, followers, outbox, and NodeInfo requests. See ActivityPub endpoints.
• The federation inbox becomes a public, unauthenticated POST endpoint — rate-limited per source IP and capped in body size.

What it does not change

• Drafts are never federated. Only published posts are delivered.
• Private accounts still gate their followers — approval is enforced before anything is delivered.
• The API and your reading experience are unchanged.

Turning it back off

Flip the toggle and restart. The ActivityPub code paths stop being loaded entirely. Remote followers will simply stop receiving deliveries; they are not notified, and their follow records remain on their side.

Moderation across instances

Once you federate, you inherit the wider network’s problems. Two tools:

• Admin → Federation defederates (blocks) a domain, and purges already-cached content from it.
• Admin → Reports is the moderation queue for user-reported posts and actors, local or remote.

See Moderation tools.

Deliverability notes

• Delivery runs through a queue, so a slow or down remote server never blocks a user’s request. With Redis configured, pending deliveries survive a restart.
• Fedify handles HTTP signatures and retries.
• A remote server that has blocked your domain will reject deliveries; that is their decision and there is nothing to fix on your side.