this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
140 points (91.2% liked)

Selfhosted

40390 readers
532 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bizzle 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I have my own Lemmy instance running on my home server, but I'm here. "But Bizzle," you may be asking yourself, "why go through all the trouble of configuring your own instance just to wind up on Lemmy.World anyway?"

I'm glad you asked! And the answer is that federation only fetches parent comments. I'm glad Lemmy exists, and I'm going to keep using it, but we need federated sibling comments for this to actually be good, in my opinion.

EDIT: I actually couldn't have been more wrong.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would be happy if my locally posted comment showed up on lemmy.world at all :-) (If this one does, maybe I was just impatient with the initial sync or so)

EDIT: Nevermind, I was too impatient :-)

[–] Lantier 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can attest sibling comments are meant to be federated (example thread from another instance: https://lemmy.world/comment/97687), but I was here at the very start of this instance and there were federation issues. Posts not showing, comments not showing on other instances. It's all very new so there may be technical issues.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Did you mean that child comments are not federated?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think that's correct.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Seeing as we're viewing this from many different instances, it certainly sounds like a configuration issue on their side

[–] bizzle 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you're right, I may have misinterpreted the documentation. I attached a screenshot below.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So that's why there were no comments when I searched a post from a remote instance. You need to search the comments individually. It's kinda weird design imo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

once you subscribe to a community all new comments and posts get federated, but yeah if you just search for the post then you can't seethe comments unless you search for them

[–] falconfetus8 6 points 1 year ago

That sounds like a huge oversight, if so.