Café

if it is any consolation, I beg to differ. it has been a crazy week for lemmy. first, version 0.18.1 came out which had massive improvements, two of them that could be the cause of needing to logout/clear cache are:

• fixing the cookie path (if you've ever encountered the logout button not working, this was the fix)
• changing the path of some .js files (this required everyone to refresh their browser so they could request them from the new path)

then a few days after 0.18.1 was released, lemmy had that xss security issue, and temporary measures had to be taken to secure our instance (sort of like a lockdown):

• the admins rotated the signing key for the json web tokens (which automatically logged everybody out, so you had to login again; lots of instances did this)
• federation was turned off (which would affect your subscriptions and posts from communities on other instances; I would say fewer instances did what we did to turn federation off completely, some merely blocked the instances that were affected by the hack)

federation only started working again properly about 2-3 hours ago. so that's probably when your subscriptions and posts started getting through.

will we ever need to turn federation off again? probably, but hopefully not soon. anyway, now that the admins have done it once, they know what's involved, so hopefully the next time this happens, federation will only be turned off for a short while instead of around one and a half days.

by the way, if you find any post or comment that didn't properly federate over here, these instructions may help. (the short version is: just like you can search for communities from other instances, you can search for posts and comments (and users) too, you just need to search for their url.)