I'm learning about the Fediverse and am confused about how federation is supposed to work. I understand that there can be communities with the same name in different instances, with different content. But I also understand you can subscribe to another instance's community. For example, there are sysadmin commnunities at lemmy.world, lemmy.one, and beehaw.org (among others). If we focus on one specific community, let's say [email protected], we can find that community from any of the instances. If I go to each instance and look at [email protected] from each one, I can see the same pinned post is at the top of each one instance's view ("Calling all /r/sysadmin reddit refugees!" by DarraignTheSane).

Great!

However, if I look at that pinned thread from each of the three instances, the comment stream is different. The post itself is the same, but the comment thread is a mixed bag. Some comments seem to appear in multiple instances while others only in one or two, but never all three

lemmy.world shows 11 comments lemmy.one shows 6 comments beehaw.org shows 4 comments

On lemmy.world, the second newest comment says "Nice! It feels like home." This comment also shows up on lemmy.one however not on beehaw

The newest comment on lemmy.world says "yeeey" but doesn't appear in any other instance's view of [email protected]

This is just one specific example. Are you not supposed to get the same content, when looking at the same community, regardless of what instance you are logged into when viewing it? Or am I missing something?

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[–] Risk 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world, so after that time point no new lemmy.world content is pulled to beehaw.org

Not sure why the lemmy.one isn't up to date as they haven't defederated with lemmy.world. It should be the same?

[–] 64bitUser 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah I saw that about beehaw, so that's not unexpected. It's actually what prompted me to look at how the community appears differently there, and then to look at how it appears elsewhere. Pick any lemmy instance and look at the sysadmin.world community from it, and it looks different than lemmy.world. I just looked at https://reddthat.com/c/[email protected]/ and there too it only shows 6 comments.

Pick any community and any number of instances and look at the community from several instances, and I see differences. I thought federation would make the same content show everywhere that is federated.

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

Why did beehaw defederate from lemmy.world?

[–] 64bitUser 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here is their post about it:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

[–] smokedtofu 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks!

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

Here is their explanation: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

I think this are all expected problems, and sooner we experience them sooner we will find solutions.

It would be much worse if everything went find for years and than problems start poping up.

Basically we are all experimenting, if you take a look at other comments all problems you have discovered are technical issues. Some are bugs, others are missing features.

We will het there, but not in few days. It takes time to develop good software and federation is quite complex piece of software.

[–] smokedtofu 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks!