this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
-36 points (37.3% liked)

Fediverse

28721 readers
94 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I just realized that none of the comments or posts I made in the last week from my instance are getting to lemmy.world.

I went to see if I my instance was defederated. No, still showing as connected.

I then went to see if I got blocked or banned. Nope, my username is not showing up in the modlog anywhere.

Is it because my instance is small? I guess not, because I can interact with people and communities from anywhere else just fine.

At the moment, the only plausible explanation I have is that lemmy.world is overwhelmed and dropping messages from smaller instances. They do however everything in their power to keep more users coming up.

Yeah, I get that they were being attacked. I can only imagine that getting DDOS'd is not fun, and worrying about the Schmoes on the smaller instances is not a top concern.

But even in the middle of these constant outages and attacks, the lemmy.world admins are still keeping registrations open? Why? Wouldn't it be better if they encouraged the users to move out of the instance to reduce the load? Isn't the whole point of decentralized technologies to be, you know, decentralized?

I shouldn't have to come here, create an account and make things even more centralized just so that I can tell people that this attitude is hurting the fediverse.

I wouldn't be so pissed at this if it weren't for the fact that some many communities were created here and is making this particular instance a crucial part of the fediverse, but the admins seems to be more worried about getting their user count up than the health of the overall system.

Please, admins, the more you go with this unstable federation and open registrations, the more of an incentive you are creating to centralize this further here. Help the fediverse and help yourselves. Close down registrations and focus on ensuring that everyone can access the communities that are being formed here.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hey, this happened to us recently. In your database check the table called 'instance ' and make sure the value for 'updated' is less than three days old for lemmy.world

There are false positives regarding the detection of "dead instances" in the latest version of Lemmy and it's actually your instance that stops sending out messages to lemmy.world

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This sounds serious. I'm going to check my own instance too just in case.

Edit: Phew, looks like there is nothing wrong in my instance. Here is a comment from Nutomic describing how the dead instances check works: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3427#issuecomment-1618405012 . Basically, if your instance is unlucky enough to fail to connect to, say, lemmy.world when it runs the daily check three times in a row (because lemmy.world happen to be down at that time), then it might decided to skip federating with lemmy.world. Three days might be too short for this check, should've been a week imo.

[–] youarehurtingthefediverse 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok, you might be on to something. The updated value is set to 2023-06-11. Should I force this value to be recent?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, try it and see if it works. Lemmy really does skip federating with an instance if hasn't been marked as updated for more than three days: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/da031a4ce2f556deae1b3dd1a542db97b3c01d0e/src/scheduled_tasks.rs#L374

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. That should fix it. There is instances that are genuinely down. Later today I'll try to share a script to detect which ones are down and which aren't via curl. In our case we had 350+ false positives.

[–] youarehurtingthefediverse 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you, unfortunately I don't think it worked. My posts from the last week or so are still not visible here.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It only works for new posts. Try creating something new in a community that you know lemmy.world knows about.

Older posts may appear progressively, but there's no guarantees.

[–] youarehurtingthefediverse 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice! That did it! Thank you so much!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Do you know if you had any cronjob running close to 0:00 (server time, possibly UTC) that could have interfered with the validation of dead instances that lemmy now does?

I'm trying to figure out what could have interfered with these checks in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@[email protected] dunno if this is helpful. I'm seeing everything, I think. But just in case.