So I just downloaded Liftoff and found a couple of communities on an instance I’d never heard of before, and I decided that I wanted to subscribe to them on my lemmy.ml profile. We are federated, and when I view the communities through the main instance I see a bunch of posts and subscribers, but when I try to view them through lemmy.ml it says there is 1 subscriber (me) and no posts. I tested this on my mobile browser. Jerboa, and Liftoff all with the same result.
Is this one of those cases where it’s a bug and will sort itself out, or am I doing something wrong? I don’t wanna miss out potentially cool communities if they just aren’t coming up for me
- Things don’t get backfilled, so until a new action happens on an old post/comment/etc they won’t show up on your instance. New things should make their way in eventually though.
- Taking the link of a specific post/comment from the community instance and searching for it from your instance should populate it on your instance, just like you probably had to do to get the community to show up so you could subscribe at all.
- It is always worth checking both instance’s “Blocked Instances” list just in case. Lemmy.ml’s is here.
Ah I see, I didn’t know that an update to a post needed to be made, that makes sense. The instance isn’t blocked, but I’ll try the post link suggestion and fiddle around to see if that can help populate everything. Thanks for your response!
I tried searching for a post link in my instances search and nothing came up. I’ve had this issue with jerboa too, and I think in the browser, where I try to do !community@instance.ee or whatever and it won’t come up, it almost never works for me. but if I type the name of the instance simply, it will populate. I must be doin something funky
I don’t know if it’s related, but I sometimes have trouble seeing all the posts in non-local communities. Sometimes I have to go to the originating instance. Evidently this is something that’s supposed to be resolved or at least mitigated with the latest 0.18.0 release, but my home instance has not upgraded yet.
Even with 0.18, the design of replication of comments and posts is not robust enough to deal with all the complexities of peer to peer distribution. There is an open GitHub issue on this matter: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101
A Lemmy server does not “backfill” the postings and comments in the community when it is the very first on your local server to subscribe. It only goes from the time of the first successful subscribe forward.
The code to back-fill does not currently exist, so it isn’t a choice by the people running the server, it’s a lack of capability.
