you’d probably be better off setting up your own domain server and trying to get that working

That’s technically a subdomain and the same reason email went with @

This is super cool! You really get a lot just by making a FE for the lemmy API. Good work! 👍

For me federation is working to mastodon, but I don’t think comments are really out yet, but I use cactus comments for it, but that doesn’t federate to mastodon, it federates to matrix. It also requires a matrix server, which was a total pita to set up.

I’m currently using write.as. It’s a pretty bare-bones setup when in single user mode and doesn’t give the kind of list view you might expect for readers - it loads everything onto a single page. I’m considering maybe using Ghost, which is another big name in the federated blogging space. Write.as doesn’t come with comments by default, but I was able to add cactus-comments, but it was a huge PITA because it requires a matrix server.

I do, however, like the minimalist UI aspect of it. You can take a look at mine here. I was also able to get around the list thing by using pinned posts, which stay at the top, so I made an about, a directory, and subscribe pages.

Write.as will post to mastodon under an account that it creates and I have myself on mastodon as a verified owner of the blog site.

is the baby federating?

I thought you could put the full URL and find it that way as well, but if you mean you want to find it by title, that should work normally, unless i misunderstood