this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023

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Federation issues (suppo.fi)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I've got my instance (the one I'm posting from) running a couple days ago. Everything seems to work, but I notice that the little content I have on my instance can only very rarely be found from other instances. I installed lemmy with the ansible method, but is there something I should still look at myself? Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hi! I've checked and federation with your instance appears to be working properly.

For content from another instance to fetched, a person in your instance has to be subscribed to the community in which it is posted in the other instance. As an admin I try to browse other instances and subscribe liberally so that I can pull content into mine.

Likewise, for your content to be fetched to another instance, you need a user from that instance to be subscribed to the community in your instance.

If you search for a specific post, the content of that post will be pulled into the instance from which it is searched, but you need a subscriber to pull new posts.

I hope that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Thanks. More specifically it seems that searching for my posts in another instances search fails every time if it somehow isn't already there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fetching remote content only works if you are logged in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Well I guess this explains it then. Thanks! Maybe it would be good idea to mention this in the troubleshooting page too

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I can't tell you why this happens, but I can tell you that if you search - click somewhere to go to another page - and then search again for the same url, then the post should appear. I think that the first search will fetch the post but not display it, and the second search it will display it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

When I search for foreign posts from my instance it usually appears within seconds or at least under a minute. But the other way around searches I made yesterday still yield no results, so that's why I think something's wrong.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was able to pull posts from your instance without problem (https://mander.xyz/post/645330)

If you give me a specific example I can look at it!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks. https://suppo.fi/post/189 via sopuli.xyz, I did that one yesterday.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Strange. I can pull it from Mander (https://mander.xyz/post/645346), so I was not able to diagnose the problem by monitoring the logs. I could also pull it from feddit.de

I confirm that I can't pull it from lemmy.ml, sopuli.xyz, lemmygrad.ml, nor beehaw.org but without looking at their logs it is difficult to diagnose what is going on. Sorry :/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, feddit.de was strangely the only instance that had my posts when I searched. Anyway, thanks for looking into it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I've made a second account on my server that is just a dummy account which subscribes to everything I can find.

Actually thinking of maybe writing a script to check popular instances for new communities daily and having it automatically subscribe.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

This very question was answered here https://lemmy.ml/post/53911

As @[email protected] said:

It will fetch the first 20 posts when the community is first searched from your instance (but no votes, comments etc). Once any local user subscribes to the community, all new posts/comments/votes etc will be delivered to your instance. Old items will only be fetched on demand (eg if you search them, or if they are referenced by a new item).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Content for communities you've created on your instance will only be visible on other instances if a user there has subscribed to the community.

Or do you mean yours posts to communities homed to other instances do not show up?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Posts within my communities. I've tested pasting a posts url on a few instances search and usually nothing shows up.

Also see my test post here: https://suppo.fi/post/1
Comments missing when viewed from sopuli.xyz: https://sopuli.xyz/post/625900

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Then yes, as I said... no users on sopuli.xyz have subscribed to your community yet: [email protected] - 0 subscribers

Other replies here have provided more info :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That sounds like language settings problems. It's confusing :/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, I've seen a few people mention that. Still not quite sure how that works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Select all languages that you want to see in the settings. Also select undefined.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

You have to be logged in while searching for it to actually do anything

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Federation for Lemmy and mastodon works on a need to know basis. Otherwise even the smallest server never used would have to download all content immediately all the time.

What this means is that a community will only show and receive posts if someone from your server joins it.

Right now it's still okay to join every community that you see (I do that), but with increasing traffic that won't be useful.

If a community isn't shown on a server, you can always search on the server for https://serverThatTheCommunityIsOn.domain/c/community and the server will check if that address has a community.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've made my own instance, but gave up keeping it, because it fetched like half of the comments from other instances and federated only half of mine.

And also I don't think my single-user instance had positive impact on popular instances load. Data fetching is still happened.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It still helps a lot because most of the load is coming from serving up the feed. Just federating the data to another server is much lighter than serving up everything via the instance's website.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for clarification, glad I've kept configs, just stopped it. Can't say yet if I like lemmy and will stay, but I hope that'll turn up to something great soon, so that instance will run again.

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