this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Why do some posts and communities not show up on all instances? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Reddit refugee and Noob to lemmy/fediverse here.

For example, I'm currently logged into my lemmy.ml account, and subscribed to [email protected] and I can see a lot of posts there. I can also see that it has over 3K users.

If I log into lemmynsfw.com, and look at my subscription to [email protected], I only see a few posts, and I know there are several that are missing. Also, it tells me that the community only has 8 users.

Is this synching problem common in lemmy, and/or the fediverse in general?

Do I have to create a new account on each server hosting communities that I want to keep up to date on?

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

lemmy.ml is defederated from lemmynsfw.com, so they cannot exchange any posts anymore. You can see the federated/defederated list at the "instances" link at the bottom of the page. This is the flip side of fediverse: the power to moderate their communities and to chose whom to associate with is given back to the users, but it has the potential to create a "swiss cheeze" social network. To create a user, look for servers that have "free speech" as one of their community values, which would not defederate for ideological/nsfw reasons, and hope no one would defederate from them for being too "free".

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

2 days ago when I posted this, lemmy.ml and lemmynsfw.com still listed each other as linked on their instances pages. Then 1 day ago, lemmy.ml listed lemmynsfw as defederated.

But my complaint, that the posts and communities from other instances is "swiss cheesed" as someone else put it, still stands.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm noticing a lot of missing posts/comments/votes too now. It's as if the federation protocol is taking a long time to catch up, even if nothing is otherwise blocked. For now I have to browse the communities I like on their host servers through https://lemmyverse.net/, then copy the fediverse URL of the comment I want to reply to, and paste it into my instance's search box. That usually syncs it up and I can reply then.

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

It's pretty bad, if your instance is missing comments and posts from another instance, they're going to be missing the comments indefinitely unless back filling is ever added to the protocol or unless users do what you're doing to manually pull comments and posts in. I think we'll see some federation improvements on the next major version of Lemmy after v0.18, but it's probably going to be shitty and unreliable until then. My personal instance is basically unusable right now.