Hello, I've been trying to setup an instance and have been running into an issue with federation. Despite having federation enabled (in the site admin panel), I can't seem to fetch or load content from other instances. I've checked the wiki and verified the system time, internet connectivity, and backend availability (via curl). I have it currently setup through Cloudflare and I am wondering if that could play into the issue. Would Cloudflare inhibit federation communication? I'd imagine the instance-to-instance requests being sent from my server would have the true origin IP that wouldn't match the DNS records (which would reflect cloudflare's ip addresses). Matrix doesn't seem to have issues with Cloudflare when it comes to federation from my experience, but I thought it would be fair to ask in case there are differences I'm not aware about. Any advice or insight would be appreciated.
Cloudflare shouldn't impact federation at all. I have my instance behind Cloudflare and it works fine. If disabling Cloudflare made it work for you, it might be that the DNS records did not have enough time to update. Or maybe it was HTTPS related and you needed to change some Cloudflare SSL/TLS settings.
When I set up my instance, I don't remember having any trouble with the Cloudflare proxy whatsoever. It's completely compatible with Lemmy.
Seconding this; Cloudflare should not create issues with federation unless your configuration at Cloudflare is blocking inter-server communication. This is more likely to be some other issue instead.