I've noticed sometimes that comments and posts to communities on other instances take a very long time to show up on the main instance, sometimes never showing up. Like, I post something, and it shows up on beehaws copy. But, I go to the other instance to look, and I don't see it (though sometimes it shows up a few hours later). I checked and our two instances were federated in each case I have noticed.

Anyone else notice this? Is this expected?

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[–] nromdotcom 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never run a Lemmy or kbin instance, but have run a mastodon instance and am familiar with distributed systems in general.

Probably both the source instance and the destination instance have a queue of federated messages to process and the message needs to be sent to the destination and processed into the destination database respectively before it'll show up on the destination of the worker threads get overwhelmed.

I'd imagine that recently with the influx of users, activity, and the size of the federation, a number of instances probably sometimes have some pretty deep queues to work through at times.

Ten hours isn't ideal and hopefully isn't common, but doesn't seem out of the question in the case of connectivity issues or spikes im activity.

[–] MeowKittyWow 3 points 1 year ago

That makes sense, and is understandable. I think in some cases messages might be getting lost entirely though; like, I have one post from 6 days ago that didn't federate, for example.