This is such a nice pinned post! I don't have any issues but I'll let you know if I do. Thanks preston :)
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I've got a question...
I'm looking at https://possumpat.io/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world, and presumably most of the posts are for very new communities. I can access the communities through their home instance, but trying to access many of them through the Patio gives me a "404: couldnt_find_community".
My guess is that there's delayed synchronization between different instances, at least for the creation of communities. If this is right, do you know how often the Patio synchronizes communities with other instances? And if that's wrong do you have any other thoughts?
As a random example, just to be clear about what I mean, at time of posting this link works:
https://lemmy.world/c/mapporncirclejerk
and this link does not:
This is known issue with how Lemmy works and decides to pull remote communities, there's some discussion going on right now with the developers Github on how to improve it - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/853 and https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/436 for example.
Instances don't know anything about remote communities until a user makes them aware of it - there isn't actually any automatic discovery going on. That's another pain point with federation that I hope improves down the line. Feddit.de has a really good community search tool here we can use in the meantime: https://browse.feddit.de
The workaround for this, for now, is to search for the remote community in the search bar, either with the full URL or with the "!community@instance.com" format. That will 'force' Lemmy to discover the remote community, and then everyone on our instance will be able to see it naturally as you'd expect:
Fascinating... My practical web knowledge is stuck back in 1.0, but it seems to me that the web server could maybe be set up to do this just based on URL parsing. I mean, you've got a URL like,
https://possumpat.io/c/mapporncirclejerk@lemmy.world
Prior to you pulling that in, it was still running some sort of backend script that generated the "couldnt_find_community" page... Is there some reason that script couldn't do a remote fetch? Seems like all the information you need is in the URL.
Though I guess there's a broader question about how federation works... Does the Patio cache posts and comments from other instances? If it does, is that push-style or pull-style—i.e., if someone makes a post on a remote community that the Patio is federated with, does the remote instance tell the Patio "hey guuuuuuuuuuuys I gotta new post for ya," or does the Patio periodically go out and ask other instances what new posts they have?
I totally agree that it should just try to pull/search for the remote community if you give it a url it doesn't recognize - I think it's just an feature oversight with how Lemmy is designed right now.
ActivityPub, the protocol that Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc. all use, is "Push based" as I understand it. Think of it kind of like email, we don't know about new posts/upvotes/comments until it arrives in our inbox. When someone here subscribes to a remote community, we're telling that remote server "hey, include me in your distribution list for this stuff." Check out the link above, the spec is pretty detailed and imo makes for some interesting reading!
I noticed something today and I'm curious if it's related to this conversation--
When I look at the browser-based pages for larger instances, I get a ton of "All-New" posts that I don't see when I'm using possumpat.io's "All-new" sort function (in browser or in jerboa).
If lemmy is "push based", does that mean we're only getting "All-New" posts from communities where at least one of our members is subscribed? Specifically, it doesn't seem like we get posts from instances where at least one person is subscribed to one community, because I don't see "All-New" posts from most of the communities on lemmy.world despite having subscribed to a few of its communities, for example.
If so.... dang that sucks! I've been feeling a little surprised at how few new posts I see, but then I see posts on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml talking about how they literally can't stop the flow of new posts!
Yep, that's how it works - every post in "All" is coming from at least one person on our instance being subscribed to that community. This one reason why I'd like to hit a sweet spot of a couple hundred users - Eventually we'll get enough remote subscriptions that it'll feel like a firehose of content.
If there's stuff you want to see, I'd highly suggest going and spelunking on other instances and finding new communities to get things bootstrapped. I've been digging around once a day or so myself, so I'm confident in a few weeks we'll be seeing more stuff than we could ever want. 🙂
Edit: Also worth mentioning, this is yet another pain point that developers are looking at: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
This is fascinating - thanks for explaining why things don't always show up by default. It's time for us to get out there and populate our ALL section, it seems! :)
Woot! You're the best! This is so fun.
Today especially, not sure why, a lot of the posts I participate in suddenly disappear and I can’t find them. Someone just replied to one of my comments on a post in !android@lemmy.world and now the post is gone and there are no comments when I go to the post via my inbox. Not sure if it’s lag or something. It was loading fine 10 minutes ago
Edit: link to the post(?) here https://lemmy.ca/post/1165975
Edit edit: I think I’m going to knock this one off as a Lemmy.world problem since it seems to be happening on my other accounts as well
Yeah, comparing the comment chains between us and lemmy.ca, it seems like everything is okay:
https://possumpat.io/comment/442410
https://lemmy.ca/comment/849950
Federation weirdness from the large instances is probably going to happen for a while - I believe there are some changes coming soon in 18.1 that will hopefully smooth some of that out.
Weirdly enough, I can view these if I’m not logged in but I get a “server error” (literally just a white page with server error) if I try to view them while logged in. Talking specifically about the possum patio link
Can you give a screenshot of the error on possumpat.io? That sounds like something that neeeds investigation
This is all I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/dF3v2Ej
response:status: 500
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2023 20:51:30 GMT
ETag: W/"c-ghCMv/+Srhv72FFxL2itcyRPdGg"
Server: nginxx-powered-by: Express
well that's... not very descriptive. I'll dig into the logs and see what I can find.
In that picture, can you share the contents of the "console" tab in that inspect view? I think there will be a more helpful error message there.
This is the whole header for the error:
I think I might know what's going on - peeking in the database, it looks like you somehow disallowed notifications for all languages other than "undetermined" in your profile.
Can you try enabling all languages in your settings and see if that fixes the issue?
So when I went to my profile and enabled all other languages (I think) and youuuuu are correct. Thanks for the help! I am not sure how that happened given that it took me forever to select everything on mobile… but hey! Problem solved.
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