Hey all, just wondering if I'm missing something or just have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works. I spun up a small docker instance for myself in order to interact with federated lemmy without bogging down the existing servers. I am noticing that although I am subscribed to a lot of communities, some of them don't seem to be updating. I know that my instance will only fetch new posts and comments from the communities I'm subscribed to, but even those are not being updated. Some communities seem to be working, but others just aren't updating. Is there a requirement that I'm not meeting to be able to fetch new data? Appreciate any ideas, thank you!
Edit: the problem was in the instance's language settings. It is not obvious, but you can, and should, select multiple languages in your instance's admin panel (at least Undetermined and your main language). I solved by selecting every language in the admin panel, and then selecting the relevant ones again from the individual user settings.
It should just work. You are able to search for and subscribe to communities on other instances, so it's not the internal networking issue I ran into with federation and smtp.
I'll ask anyway, what do you see in the lemmy logs? Any errors?
sudo docker logs lemmy_lemmy_1I've been monitoring the logs, the only error I've seen go by is the following one from the postgres container:
lemmy-postgres-1 | 2023-06-11 17:37:12.579 UTC [31] ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "idx_activity_ap_id" lemmy-postgres-1 | 2023-06-11 17:37:12.579 UTC [31] DETAIL: Key (ap_id)=(https://lemmy.world/activities/create/f26c82de-548d-405a-bca3-00775a73411f) already exists. lemmy-postgres-1 | 2023-06-11 17:37:12.579 UTC [31] STATEMENT: INSERT INTO "activity" ("data", "local", "updated", "ap_id", "sensitive") VALUES ($1, $2, DEFAULT, $3, $4) RETURNING "activity"."id", "activity"."data", "activity"."local", "activity"."published", "activity"."updated", "activity"."ap_id", "activity"."sensitive"Probably a red herring. I see that error in my Postgres logs too.
Currently I am on 0.17.3 for both, I could update to the latest release candidate and see if anything changes.
It's worth a shot. Let's see if it makes any difference.
Still seeing the same behavior. Weirdly, if I search for a specific post that I know should be appearing but isn't, it pops up immediately in the search results and I can even navigate to it within my instance (it still doesn't show comments), but it is not popping up in my feed anywhere or on the community's age in my instance.
This sounds like it might actually be a bug. I've been having issues where some posts show up if I'm logged out, or go directly to the instance hosting the post, but it doesn't show up when I am logged into my instance and go to the community.
You could try to file a bug in the project repo on GitHub? Of course someone else could also post some useful information here in [email protected] soon.
One other possibility, does the post you selected have a language selected? If it was posted with no language, not even undetermined, it will cause display issues and won't show up for some.
Aha! The post that isn't showing up on my instance doesn't have the language set. Could have something to do with that... 🤷♂️
Damn, there it is. It was the language, actually the opposite of what you described. I logged out of my instance and magically all the posts appeared. Then I noticed that only posts without a language were appearing. I had undetermined selected as the server language in the admin panel, I didn't realize I could select more than one thing (and the warning about deselecting Undetermined had me thinking that only having undetermined selected would let me see everything). So, I turned on more languages in the admin panel and then selected English and Undetermined as the languages in my user account and voilá! Thank you for your help!
That's awesome! I'm glad we figured it out. 😄
Looks like the language things "breaks" stuff in either direction... 🤷♂️
I am thinking I might just select all the languages in my instance settings. Missing some posts and comments because of this language setting is kind of odd, and as I said sort of feels like a bug.
It seems like you can select everything in the admin panel, which is what I did. But only the languages that have actually appeared in your instance will show as options in the individual user settings, so I was only able to select Undetermined and English on my user. Anyway, the devs should format the language lists as checkboxes, that would have completely solved the issue since I would have known from the start that I could select multiple things. My browsing experience just got exponentially better!
Huzzah! 🎊
Glad I could help! 😄
Yes, the UI has some usability issues that need to be addressed. I would recommend filing bugs / enhancement requests on the project issues page in GitHub.
Done!