this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Weird things I keep noticing on Lemmy... (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 years ago by Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de to c/tchncs@discuss.tchncs.de
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  • Number of votes for posts and comments differ from instance to instance (sometimes drastically, 300 vs 30 for example)
  • Number of comments differ from instance to instance (meaning you can "miss" some comments on one instance, because they simply aren't there)
  • Order of posts and comments differ from instance to instance (even with the same sorting option)
  • If you leave the post open in the tab, you can come back to that tab later, only to see that it is a completely different post than the one you opened, but the comments are still from the original post.
  • On the front page, more post will sometimes randomly start loading from the top, those posts usually come from a specific community and are old posts (sometimes very old)

Does anyone else experience this?
Are those simply bugs, "features", problems with specific instances, or just the shortcomings of this kind of platform?

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[–] Vittelius@feddit.de 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

1-3 are shortcomings of federated platforms. Not all servers are aware of every other server leading to certain informations be fetched in a different order or not at all.

4 is a bug

5 is also a bug, this one has already been fixed in the code, the next release of the server software is going to address this issue. I've read that the devs are trying to release this version next week

Edit: fixed layout for better readability

[–] Wistful@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you for the response.
I have one more question...
Given enough time, if people stop interacting with the certain post, are all the votes and comments going to synchronize at the end, so that they match across the instances? Or are there some other factors that make that impossible?

[–] darcy@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 years ago

Huh I'm new to this - it seems more complicated than I thought!

[–] lixus98 1 points 2 years ago

To add to this, currently Lemmy (and maybe other federated sites) handle each vote and comment as a single http request, so propagating votes and comments takes a LOT of processing power and bandwidth.

However like all protocols, I think ActivityPub will solve this issues by sending aggregated requests (sending batches of votes and comments instead of one by one)