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.
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.
Because lemmy.ml is the official instance meaning it was created by the developers of the people who created the backend for lemmy as well so people assume it would be the correct one to join.
Thankfully fediverse doesn’t work like that and in a few days I expect users to be spread around in instances more evenly.
That doesn’t really make sense though - shouldn’t comments be federated across all communities?
They do. However, it’s only after federation has been established between two communities.
After a while, these newer communities will be federated in and everyone will be connected.
As lemmy.ml is the oldest community, it also has the most history (as the newer instances don’t currently get the history).
This will likely be fixed at some point.
The person you are replying to deleted the comment. That said, as I understand it, comments are federated once someone on a server subscribes. So, not all comments will be federated. However, stuff listed in the comments here would seem to break my understanding of how federation works. I’m very curious to hear the answers.
