I still see some federation issues:

  • It sometimes takes a few tries before a remote post or community is found
  • Remote replies don’t show up
  • Subscriptions to remote communties are stuck in ‘pending’

I’ll look into that.

  • RuudOPMA
    13•1 year ago

    Most issues should now be resolved, there was an error in the nginx conf.

    • @PriorProject
      3•1 year ago

      I’m not sure if we expect improvements to be immediate here, or if they require time for replication to kick in, but some observations that suggest things are still a little funky:

      Maybe this will self-resolve if replication is churning… but community searches seem not to be sorted yet.

      • RuudOPMA
        5•1 year ago

        I don’t know how communities are added. Is it automatically discovered or only when searched or viewed by users? The search should be much better now I fixed an nginx issue. When I search for Mastodon I get loads of results, including the community at lemmy.ml. But searching by community name [email protected] doesn’t work. Sometimes it works when you click search a few times, sometimes not at all.

        I’ll discuss that with the Lemmy admin Matrix channel later, now it’s time for bed…

        • @PriorProject
          6•1 year ago

          Ok, I’ve been setting up a bunch of remote subs and I think I have a better idea of the behavior we’re seeing here. I should note, I don’t know what’s SUPPOSED to be happening and I don’t know what happens on other Lemmy instances. But I can now see what’s happening here on lemme.world and it’s consistent but complicated enough to be confusing.

          Basically, it seems like the community list at https://lemmy.world/communities is some kind of local cache and it seems to get populated whenever someone searches for a sub with the bang syntax, like !mastodon@lemmy.ml. So you end up with a confusing sequence of events like this:

          • Time 0:
            • James visits https://lemmy.world/communities to look in the ALL list for mastodon@lemmy.ml, but it’s not listed.
            • James does a keyword search for mastodon in the community searchbox, the mastodon community is not returned because it’s not in this instances community list yet.
            • James gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing.
          • Time 1:
            • Janet visits https://lemmy.world/communities and searches for !mastodon@lemmy.ml using the bang syntax. No results are returned.
            • In the background, Janet’s search causes our instance to discover the community and silently add to the community list. I don’t know why this happens, but it happens reliably.
            • Janet gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing (even though she actually just added it to the list, she didn’t check again to realize that).
          • Time 2:
            • Tom visits https://lemmy.world/communities and sees mastodon@lemmy.ml is already there. Reports everything is fine, other people must have been confused or that replication kicked in on its own (even though Janet JUST added it to the list, he didn’t see the timing correlation to realize that Janet’s search triggered the community being added to our list).
            • Tina does a keyword search with mastodon, and it returns the community she’s looking for.
            • Janet searches using the bang syntax like !mastodon@lemmy.ml, STILL gets no results even though the community is in our community list. Edit: Since writing this I’ve been told that lemmy searches that return zero results may actually just not be finished. Maybe I/Janet would have gotten a result here if we waited long enough. Or maybe would have eventually gotten a result even at Time 1.)

          So you can see that you’ll observe different behaviors based on whether you do a keyword search, bang-syntax search, or browse the community list… and you’ll see different results depending on whether ANYONE has searched using the bang-syntax yet.

          So the reliable way to subscribe to a community is first to search by bang-syntax, then scan the community list (or keyword search) AFTER the bang-search… and then you’ll find your community.

          No idea if this weird behavior is by-design, a bug in Lemmy itself, or a problem with the lemmy.world setup. But I’m pretty sure it explains all the weird behaviors we’ve seen around communities sometimes being easy to find and other times being hard to find.

          • RuudOPMA
            3•1 year ago

            Thank you for the research. I will take this up with the Lemmy devs.

          • @[email protected]
            3•1 year ago

            As a new user on sh.itjust.works this has been my experience as well. It also seems like just pasting the link to the community causes the search to find it as well, which can be a bit more convenient than typing out the bang. Even pasting the link to a comment from a different community procs the search to find it. It is weird that it doesn’t show up the first time and you have to redo the search though.

            • @PriorProject
              2•1 year ago

              URL searches exhibit the same behavior as bang-searches. Is it documented somewhere that the bang-syntax is deprecated? If you visit any community on lemmy.ml, the bang syntax is how it recommends to search for the community on a remote instance, like in the upper right box of https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy.

              • @ericjmorey
                3•1 year ago

                The Lemmy project is not well documented and is not close to being settled. I’d consider it beta software

          • @ericjmorey
            2•1 year ago

            There are 2 searchs that you could be cross talking about. The search on the Lemmy.world communities page and the search in the lemmy.world header (or hamburger menu on mobile)

              • @[email protected]
                3•1 year ago

                I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types, that was a bit hard for me to notice at first

                • @PriorProject
                  3•1 year ago

                  I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types…

                  Yeah, that’s true by default. But in both cases, the search results page includes a dropdown of types. The header version defaults to all and the communities version defaults to communities. But they’re the same search results page, and you can filter the types however you want on either if you change the value of that dropdown once you arrive at the initial search results.

              • @ericjmorey
                2•1 year ago

                They don’t work the same in my observations

          • Phil
            2•1 year ago

            Thanks been wondering what the hell was going on , this definitely works on lemmy but not on kbin as far as I can tell

        • @PriorProject
          2•1 year ago

          I don’t have insights into how the communities get discovered, though I’m new to the ecosystem too. If I find anything as I’m reading around I’ll pipe up. In the meantime I’ll try other ways of searching as you’ve described. Get some rest, cheers.

  • Lodion 🇦🇺
    4•1 year ago

    Hi there lemmy.world people :)

    I’ve noticed many of the issues you’re seeing on my new instance also. Specifically around odd behaviour when searching for communities. I suspect these are bugs in Lemmy itself, not environmental. Simply because the largest instances have been around so long and are so well heavily used, its not noticed.

    I’m going to lurk around in [email protected] to see if you solve any of the other odd little issues I’ve been seeing :)

    • RuudOPMA
      4•1 year ago

      Hi Lemmy.click people! At least everything seems kind of working now, maybe not as smooth or userfriendly as one would hope, but let’s give it time. We’ll keep an eye on errors in the logs, and I’m sure the Lemmy devs do their part in improving stuff. Let’s not forget, we run Lemmy version 0.17.3 ;-)

      • Lodion 🇦🇺
        2•1 year ago

        Absolutely! All things considered, I’m hugely impressed with how well the federation is working between instances etc. Looking forward to seeing Lemmy improve and mature over time :)

        • RuudOPMA
          3•1 year ago

          Me too! Already at 63 users in 5 days… and counting… How about you?

          • Lodion 🇦🇺
            2•1 year ago

            Just a handful, I’ve not opened my instance up publically… or advertised/announced it at all for people to sign up. For now, just seeing how things go.

            • @PriorProject
              2•1 year ago

              FYI, lemmy.click is listed on https://join-lemmy.org/instances. I think this happens automatically when you federate with other major instances. If you don’t want people joining, you might want to disable signups or ensure they require admin approval.

              If you DON’T want to be listed on join-lemmy.org, I’m not sure what you have to do. I think I heard if you don’t have a server description you won’t be listed there but I don’t really know how it works.

              • Lodion 🇦🇺
                2•1 year ago

                Thanks for the heads up, but yeah I’d spotted that already. I don’t mind it being listed… easy enough to ignore requests for now :)

  • @iblis_sensual
    3•1 year ago

    It shows “pending” but I am actually able to see posts from remote communities in my Subscribed feed.

    • @PriorProject
      4•1 year ago

      Resubscribing fixed many but not all of my pending subs, for what it’s worth.

      Edit: Eventually re-re-subbing fixed all my pending subs. Resub and eventually you’ll get through.

      • RuudOPMA
        3•1 year ago

        Yes, I fixed an issue, now subscribing seems to work.

  • RuudOPMA
    2•1 year ago

    I do think federation can take some time especially with servers that are overloaded. But if even after a while something doesn’t federate well need to troubleshoot.

    • @SuaveBet
      2•1 year ago

      Looks different to me. Your comment doesn’t show up on the lemmy.ml version.

      • @INeedMana
        1•1 year ago

        Thanks for checking. It should show up there, right?

  • @Kurumatron
    1•1 year ago

    Hi, I want to join lemmy.ml/c/unixporn but I can’t find that community when searching it here. I’ve noticed that other communities that have porn on their name also don’t show up, are they blocked?

      • @Kurumatron
        0•1 year ago

        I was able to find it now! weird, because when I tried earlier today I couldn’t find that community

    • RuudOPMA
      1•1 year ago

      Test succeeded!

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Just a note. I can only see my comment and your reply from lemmy.ca. I know if I browse directly it will show up but maybe something is still wonky with the federation.