For example, I’m on Lemmy.sdf.org and I joined the Apple@lemmy.ml community. But there are many missing articles and comments. If I browse directly on Lemmy.ml for the same article there ~90% of comments are missing.
https://lemmy.ml/post/1152794 has 26 comments https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/11232 has 0 comments
Pretty sure it doesn’t “take a while” for things to sync up. Once an instance is discovered by another, any posts from that point forward will appear, but anything made before then will not. I have personally seen new instances sync with kbin.social that have less comments than if you look at the main instance’s thread. They have added more comments, but only new ones made after it was discovered.
Whether I’m right or not, I’m not sure. Would have to hear from the devs to know for sure, but from all I’ve seen there is no syncing of archived or historical postings, just discovery of and acceptance of new data from other instances.
This is my understanding as well, after using a number of different instances over the last few months.
I believe this issue will mostly sort itself out in the future as the federated network becomes more “connected”
A new instance connecting to an existing one will have content from the established instance missing, but as time goes on that content becomes a smaller portion of the overall content.
I anticipate some development on this issue in the near future anyway, perhaps cached content that is able to be “pushed” to a requesting instance.
There could be several reasons for this, depending on what exactly you mean.
When the first person on an instance to subscribe to a remote community does so, the local mirror of that community starts receiving posts and comments from the original. But older posts and comments are not retrieved. You’re only getting stuff going forward.
So, if you’re talking about an instance that is much younger than Lemmy.ml, it’ll have only a small fraction of the backlog.
On the other hand, if what you’re seeing is that new comments and posts aren’t reliably showing up, we’ll, that’s likely an issue of the server hosting the community being absolutely fucking destroyed by traffic right now.
This could mean that syncing is in progress between these two instances. In that case, if you check back in a bit, you should see all the comments.
Edit: just to clarify, I am speculating here - I’m still learning how it all works myself
I think there might be more going on as the post in question is 4 days old, and all the comments are at least 1 day old; is the syncing typically days behind? The federated version that OP links shows 0 comments, and the version on my instance has just 5 comments.
Is it to do with when a user on the remote instance first interacted with the post? I.e, its only showing comments from after someone on lemmy.sdf.org first interacted with the post?
Comments from before the first user subscribes simply do not sync. An instance only gets comments made after at least one user subscribes to a community.
Yeah, I think it will change eventually, but there are some issues that make it hard to fix right away. Lemmy is basically beta software written by two guys that has been thrust into the spotlight by current events. There are going to be some growing pains, but I have hope that things will improve with time.
Would you mind elaborating on this a bit or linking to documentation that explains this in more detail? It seems that unless I visit any thread on its own instance, I’m not getting the actual number of upvotes and/or comments. Waiting and checking back doesn’t seem to solve it (double checked on a post I checked about 4 hours ago, still can’t see the full thing), so maybe it helps if I know what’s going on exactly.
Yeah on Lemmy.sf.org the Apple@Lemmy.ml community has most comments missing. But stuff like Memes@Lemmy.ml seem to be synced better. Maybe there wasn’t subscribers for Apple community until I subscribed? So now it is just slowly starting to sync up? If so how long does it take and how many days back will it got to fetch comments?
To add another example here, I saw the same behavior on this post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1136642. Right now it has 43 comments on lemmy.ml but over on my instance (link) there’s only 18.
It’s also unclear to me why some posts are not showing up, since the new ones (4h ago) appear, some old ones (7d ago) too, but some in the middle (6d, 5d ago) do not, which doesn’t really make sense…
check your language setting in your profile. make sure you have “Undefined” selected along with “English”, then reload.
But, that should only matter when viewing via a logged in server. Those two links are to communities directly on servers. I suppose it’s possible no one on lemmy.sdf.org has subscribed to that community. That could explain the original question but doesn’t explain the example posted by @caio@sh.itjust.works example of https://lemmy.ml/post/1136642 vs https://lemmy.fdvrs.xyz/post/1436
(How do I get a link to reference a comment that works everywhere?)
I’m sorry, i don’t know enough about lemmy yet to answer that. my advice about the language settings was what an admin told me when I had similar problems, and it worked for me. if it hasn’t solved your problem, then I guess it’s something else.
sorry I couldn’t help more
No problem. You’ve probably been here longer than me. We’re all trying to figure this out. The question reveals issues I wasn’t aware of. You actually mentioned something that would be relevant in some situations that taught me something. I was just pointing out that I didn’t think your suggestion applied here.
All of us Reddit refugees are trying to figure out the nuances. I appreciate your comment because it taught me something new.
Just to add… It is really not true to be told it doesn’t matter what instance I’m on when in fact it seems that it really does matter if I’m interesting in participating in comments (or just reading them).
Well, you CAN participate, subscribe and read the community of another instance. You don’t have to be part of the other instance to do so.
Just make sure you are browsing / searching all and not just local.
I am reading and writing this from kbin and not even Lemmy btw.
I’m aware of how it should work. But click the two links above.
Since I originally posted this thread only 3 comments are newly visible on my local fedi while the origin fedi (Lemmy.ml) still has 26 comments. So it took over a day to sync 3 comments made days ago? 🤨
What’s frustrating is not all communities are this out of sync. AskLemmy is staying pretty close to immediately synced. Other communities (on same origin server) can be more behind.
If you are the first to subscribe to one from another region, it takes a while for comments to sync. Once it does, you can read and comment to your heart’s content.
It doesn’t take a while for comments to sync. Comments from before the first user subscribes simply do not sync.
