I see this as deleted in lemmy.ml but still there in lemmy.world so uh I guess I’ll answer anyway.

1. You can insert any instance in the settings, it doesn’t have to be in the database. If that instance isn’t linked to any of the instances in the database, then the communities from that instance won’t show up in the suggestions. But you can fix that by linking that instance to one of the instances in the database.
2. The blocked thing isn’t a counter, it’s just the number of instances that your preferred instance blocks. So it just means it worked. I’ll get rid of that message since it’s not useful.

Looks like it’s not working for you. The extension is supposed to work without setting a preferred server. The instance list is supposed to be pre populated. Something must have happened that prevented it from getting the list. Also, when you click save, it’s supposed to show a popup from the browser asking for extra permissions, and then in the Lemmy Go window there’s supposed to be a text at the bottom saying “validating instance…” and then “success!”, or some error. Is the rest of the extension working for you without setting the instance? It’s weird because the instance list comes from the same place as the community list used for the suggestions, so I’m wondering why one would fail but not the other.

I’m working on an update that will show better logs for errors like these.

I had never used Waterfox, but I installed it just now, to see why it doesn’t work. Latest Waterfox is apparently based on Firefox 102, which doesn’t support Manifest v3 extensions (and Lemmy Go is one of those). I tried to see if supporting v3 and v2 was feasible, but it’s just too many changes even for a relatively small extension like this one. I’d rather keep the project as simple as possible for now.

I expect Waterfox G6 (which is supposed to release in September) to support Manifest v3 extensions, so maybe we just need to wait a bit.

Agh, thanks for the heads up. No idea how I managed to break that. It will be fixed in a few minutes once it redeploys.

I’ve actually thought about it, but it sounds like too big of a project. I don’t think I’d have the time to maintain it for free. Besides, Lemmy being open source means we should probably focus on directly improving Lemmy vs doing it via addons (I made a tiny fix a few days ago, I can see myself contributing in a more soon).

I released it for Firefox now: https://lemmy.ml/post/1974940