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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[–] overzeetop 6 points 1 year ago

I ran across an odd delay today. While looking at my main Lemmy.world top page an amateur radio instance scrolled in. I assume someone on Lemmy.World subscribed and the content was synced. I tried to make a post and subscribe, but the comment never propagated. I checked the federation list and everything seemed in order. So I logged into my sopuli.xyz account/instance and that amateur radio server didn’t exist. But I could manually get to it using the /c/community@instance link. About 4 hours later I posted a comment from sopuli - and it showed up on the original instance server almost immediately (I’ve now got three tabs - the am radio instance, Lemmy.world, and sopuli.xyz). Not only that but my Sopuli comment showed up in my Lemmy.world instance almost immediately. The post I made from Lemmy.world still hasn’t propagated to any other server but the post from sopuli propagated everywhere instantly.

I can see a less patient redditor just giving up entirely with this kind of inconsistency, even ignoring that there are (for ex) three amateur radio communities and one kbin magazine, not all of which are visible even on federated instances.