It happens automatically. You just need to search for and subscribe to some communities on a few of the bigger instances from yours and it’s like magic.

In all seriousness, that’s all you need to do.

The vast majority of instances federate with everyone. You won't have any issues, unless admins of other instances decide to explicitly defederate from your instance.

I’ve docker-compose up’d Lemmy this afternoon and was able to subscribe to almost all communities I’m interested in. lemmy.ml is a bit wobbly today so it needs several tries until a subscription sticks. And federotica.com doesn’t properly confirm my subscription requests it seems. But apart from those issues, all other hosts happily let me subscribe to their communities.

Just make sure your Lemmy instance is reachable via HTTPS and has a valid certificate (e.g. Let’s Encrypt) and it should work.

I have so far been able to access and post on everyone else’s instance from my own. I do struggle with searching but I’ve considered that to be due to the large amount of people. Example was when beehaw crashed the other day.

So far, it’s been simple enough.

It's automatic. You don't have to do anything. You just need to worry about not distributing content that will leave people block you.

The only issue I has was was I got the first 20 odd instances in the instance list then it just stopped for about 48h, I guess it was the sudden upsurge in instances and some servers being overwhelmed.

All seems to be working well now.