Lemmy.World Announcements @lemmy.world DudePluto @lemmy.world 1y ago

Help: federation issues with communities not updating.

I recently migrated from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world to help with decentralizing and server load. I've noticed that a community I moderate, c/[email protected], is not updating: one of the mods I added isn't showing up on the sidebar, and a mod I removed is showing up. Plus, if I visit my community from lemmy.ml instead of lemmy.world, I see posts that aren't showing up on lemmy.world.

Is there a way I can fix this?

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I have also noticed that communities advertised in new communities don't also show up on other instances. This seems especially true of communities originating on lemmy.world (at least for me).
- Check out section 2 of finding communities in https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827.
  
  Each instance needs to be "taught" about a new remote community by a logged in user on the instance searching for the community. Community lists don't federate eagerly, it's a lazy/on-demand style of populating those lists. That's universally regarded as incredibly confusing, it's the current state of things.
  
  Thanks for the detailed explanation. I found something similar after I had posted this message.
  
  Definitely some learning to do as to how the federated system works with Lemmy.
  
  I guess a way to force each server to federate with eachother would be to use accounts on both and cross search on each one?
  
  It will fix itself eventually of course, but for now this is a weakness with a mix of large and small servers, empty and struggling servers, busy and quiet communities.
  
  I'm subbed into a lot of communities that have content on their own instance but have not yet updated on mine, but a day after posting or commenting more start to appear in waves.
  
  There's federation, which is when the instances discover each other. It can be inspected at /instances/. The instances are already successfully federated.
  
  There's community discovery, this happens when a user searches a community.
  
  There's post/comment/vote replication. It happens when a user subscribes to a community.
  
  The reason these these happen lazily, when a user requests (via search to discover, or via subscription to replicate) is so a small instance doesn't have to eagerly replicate the entire fediverse worth of posts that no one will read. Things only get copied once someone wants them, which is a general principle that is important to keeping the federated network healthy.
  
  Now, there are also usability concerns... of which I regard community discovery as the most serious. But I'm sure the devs will be thinking about all kinds of ways to improve usability, they will have to balance federation traffic so small instances remain viable and there aren't millions of federation messages flying around to ship data no one wants.
  
  I guess a way to force each server to federate with eachother would be to use accounts on both and cross search on each one?
  
  I would rephrase it to say... the way for a community to be discovered or replicated to a remote server is to ensure there's a user there who is interested in it. If there is, they'll search and subscribe. If no one on the server is interested in the community, yeah, it won't be discovered or replicate.

11 comments