I’ve noticed that often Kbin.social posts show far fewer comments on Lemmy.world than if I go directly to Kbin. Eventually it seems to resync, which got me wondering: how often do Lemmy.world and Kbin.social (and/or other federated instances) sync with each other?
In a perfect world, instantly.
Disclaimer I may be using Lemmy terms here but the idea should still hold for kbin as well. This is also true between two Lemmy instances.
Problem is, is there is a queue. Every time someone takes an action (comment, post, upvote) on a federated website a message must be sent to that community’s owner. Then that instance that owns that community has to tell every other federated instance about that action. It takes time to process this queue, both incoming and outgoing, hence why you’re seeing a discrepancy between the two servers.
