I recently spun up my own lemmy instance and was wondering if I had to manually add other lemmy instances to the 'Allowed Instances' admin field, or if they are added automatically when someone searches for a lemmy instance?
Lemmy by default will federate with all instances if you don't put instances in the "Allowed Instances" section. I've found, it's easier to federatte with all instances and ban the ones you don't want. Otherwise, you effectively use a whitelist to federate.