I registered with some smaller instances in case of server issues and defederation (beehaw) with lemmyworld. I noticed a community [email protected] that I follow from Lemmy.world is not viewable at all on lemm.ee or midwest.social for some reason. It does not come up in search and if I manually go to it’s empty. If I go to my Lemmy.world profile and look at “posts” from lemm.ee or Midwest.social, my post to that community is not there at all. Other Lemmy.ml communities work fine on all 3 instances.
Messing around with this type of thing I’ve also noticed that communities have different numbers based on what instance you view them from…the number of posts are different. Some newer or “trending” communities have no posts at all when viewed from Lemmy.world, but they do have posts and subscribers when viewed from another instance.
Is this a federation issue, or something stupid I’m doing possibly? A setting or a glitch? I’m worried that depending on the instance I use I will miss out on posts or communities that I don’t even know about.
Thanks
It’s likely that this small instance just hasn’t fetched the requested posts yet, you’ll need to wait. In the meantime, if you want to interact with those posts you can copy the link by right-clicking the colorful Fediverse icon then pasting that link into the search box. This will force the instance to fetch that particular piece of content for you.
Thanks I did try this and it seems to have worked for Midwest.social. I appreciate you explaining. I guess I understand some of how this works but some of the ways federation works aren’t clear to me.
If you have a community or post on one instance, do the instances like “crawl” each other or something? How do they eventually catch up?
Yeah, essentially. Sometimes one instance is not aware of some communities hosted on another. In this case, you need to make it aware of them by looking them up in search, after that the instance should catch up. Your instance’s version is also important; if your instance is not up to date, it may have trouble with fetching content from another, especially if the other instance has already been updated.
If there’s a community C@A hosted on instance A, a different instance B might not know about its existence until some user on B has requested it.
So if open the community on instance b (manually, because it won’t come up in search), subscribe and refresh…it should fetch it at some point? Seems odd because this is an old community with only 6 posts. It still isn’t showing up the following day
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Sweet. The one I had problems with isn’t super small. It’s got thousands of users. Lemm.ee
But seems like quite a bit of content is missing both ways between other instances.
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Yeah could be. I have seen some other comments around that lemm.ee had some visibility issues going both ways with other instances.
Still trying to understand how this works in the little details 😬
