I’ve been seeing this for quite a bit, and thought it’d resolve itself once CloudFlare was taken off, but I’m still seeing it on many external communities from e.g. Lemmy. Not all posts or comments are visible from Kbin. Any idea on what’s going on?
Edit, clarification: when I visit e.g., https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org the above mentioned sentence shows up, and I’m not able to see threads created even 13 hrs ago, like this one on the original instance https://beehaw.org/post/927935?scrollToComments=true. New content doesn’t seem to be pushed to this instance at kbin.social. This is the issue I’m referring to.
Edit 2: This is probably the answer: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/131241/What-s-up-with-The-magazine-from-the-federated-server-may#entry-comment-517045
This is a “feature”, I think backfilling would be still a nice to have with kbin.
This kind of an issue with Mastodon-Misskey interaction too.
This was something I noticed as well. All of my subscriptions across other instances are showing this message. At first they were pretty bare showing a handful of posts. After a day or two they seem to be picking up most new content.
Its confusing because I still don’t know if kbin is displaying all new content? What about old content does that eventually sync up as well?
Most replies here are correct. To clarify and summarize:
- The source of truth for a magazine/community is the server name that appears after the magazine name.
e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social <— the source of truth is kbin.social.
2. ActivityPub and the Fediverse is a “Push” model. What does this mean?
Imagine subscribing to a real-world newspaper or magazine with home delivery(few these days will actually remember this, but try to imagine at least). You will get all new issues delivered to you from the moment you became a subscriber, but you don’t get copies of all the newspapers or magazines they have ever printed delivered to you. You only get things moving forward. That’s the same with the Fediverse. After you subscribe or follow something, you will get all the new content moving forward, but not what has been created so far.
- To extend #2, it’s a “push once” model. What does that mean? It means that if I create content from my instance (which is not kbin.social) to the magazine kbinMeta@kbin.social, my content will get pushed to kbin.social. Kbin.social, however, will not “re-push” that content to everyone that kbin.social knows is subscribed to the magazine.
So how does my new content that I created in kbinMeta@kbin.social show up on other instances that are not kbin.social? I thought you said your content only gets pushed once?
Correct. However, it’s not quite as simple as my instance pushing just to kbin.social. Strictly speaking, (and this is based on experience with other platforms, not specifically how kbin works since I haven’t verified this for kbin 100%) when I create the content, my instance will push to kbin.social and all other instances (not users) that my instance knows are also subscribed to specifically kbinMeta@kbin.social. So my instance actually knows a subset of the instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social and will push the new content to each of those other instances. My instance, however, won’t necessarily know all the other instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social. As a result, some instances won’t see my new content because it wasn’t pushed to them.
- As a result, to let users know about this potential gap, not only does it mean that older content doesn’t automatically show up, it also means that not necessarily all new content will show up either.
Note on #3: I haven’t fully verified this. This statement is based on how other, non-kbin instances handle federation. This is how “likes” work across platforms like Mastodon, Calckey, etc. I see no evidence (yet) that this is any different for kbin.
Thanks for the clarifications. Regarding 3, why does some new content from e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social gets pushed to an instance like lemmy.world, but not all new content? I mean, if some content gets pushed it seems to be aware of that instance. Or is it random which content gets pushed? Does this mean that the other instance will never get all new content? This seems like quite the issue?
Edit: ok, I think I get it. So if someone from a random instance posts to e.g., technology@beehaw.org, and that instance doesn’t know about kbin.social, it won’t get pushed to this instances representation of the technology@beehaw.org magazine?
Edit: ok, I think I get it. So if someone from a random instance posts to e.g., technology@beehaw.org, and that instance doesn’t know about kbin.social, it won’t get pushed to this instances representation of the technology@beehaw.org magazine?
Correct. It’s only “pushed once” by the instance that the creator’s account is on. Of course it will push to the source of truth, but it will only push to other instances it knows are also following that magazine since it doesn’t necessarily know all of the instances that follow that magazine. In your example, yes, if the creator of the content (which in this example is an account not on beehaw.org) posts to technology@beehaw.org, their instance will push to beehaw.org and others, but if it doesn’t know that kbin.social has any followers of the magazine/community, it won’t push to kbin.social.
One other possibility is that the 3rd-party instance does know about kbin.social (for example), but has blocked (defederated with) kbin.social OR kbins.social has blocked that 3rd-party instance, my expectation would be that such content won’t show up on kbin.social’s “copy” of the community.
So it’s basically working as intended? It does feel like an annoying “issue” though. Thanks for explaining anyhow!
From what I’ve come to understand, which I am no expert, I think it means that the posts from those magazines start when someone on kbin subbed to that particular magazine. I had found a pretty small mag on Lemmy that only had maybe 5 posts when going to the original instance but after I subbed to it I would see nothing on kbin. They made 1 post after I subbed to it and that is the only post to show up on kbin, even to today even though it’s been a week or so since I subbed to it.
I had read somewhere on here that when it comes to the individual communities, kbin will only federate with that magazine after one person on here subs to it, after that anyone in kbin will see posts from that day forward.
Again, I could be very wrong, I’m just guessing based on my experience.
TLDR: the magazine only shows posts from when someone subbed forward so it will always be incomplete, I think.
I’ve heard this as well, but this is regarding new posts and comments not showing up. Not the old ones. And when they do show up after some unknown time, it might still be incomplete.
No, once somebody (anybody) from your instance has subscribed, all posts from the community from that point on ‘should’ mirror. The warning is in relation to older posts.
That said several of the Lemmy servers have been struggling with load over the last week or two (and kbin.social has occasional downtime too). Occasionally some posts might not push out to all other instances properly.