I gave up on setting up my own instance today for these exact reasons. Brand new install, multiple browsers, no matter the username, no matter the length of the password, all I get is a spinning circle when I try to login with my brand new admin account. No response whatsoever from the forgot password link either.
After searching the first time, wait a few minutes and search again, it will probably show up. I had the same issue yesterday and apparently you need to do this the first time a remote community is accessed from a local instance.
Ah, it seems as though my issue is indeed an existing username and a lack of error message.
There seems to be an issue with the signup process on lemmy.ca. I’ve been trying to signup for a while today but the Sign Up button just keeps spinning when I click it. I’ve tried numerous things to try to fix it and nothing seems to work. Signed up on a different server so I could report the issue.
If I can eventually get it to work, I’ll be hosting my personal Lemmy instance on a Hetzner CX21 VPS (2 CPU, 4GB RAM). Unfortunately after about a dozen attempts, with many variables tweaked to try to narrow down the issue, I still get nothing but a spinning button when I try to login after installation. I find it so odd that some people have no problem getting it up-and-running, and it simply won’t work for others.