Question about Lemmy federation

akkartik@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 10 points –

I noticed something today and wanted to get a gut check from people more knowledgeable than me before I file a bug, etc.

https://beehaw.org/post/579167 (A) is the same thread as https://programming.dev/post/50696 (B), but for me (account on beehaw.org) there are comments upstream that aren't in my local view. For example, searching B for 'ideas' brings up the nice comment https://programming.dev/comment/182817 by @binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh, but nothing at A. What's more, if I try to copy the URL, https://beehaw.org/comment/182817 seems to lead to an unrelated comment.

Does this seem like expected behavior, or related to recent scaling issues, or an unrelated bug?

6

  • The comment thread began with a user in lemmy.world, and the instance was defederated from beehaw, so that comment and sub-comments were not fetched
  • The 'comment ID' is not shared by different instances, so each instance will assign every comment its own ID.
  • If you want to fetch the comment from a third instance, you would need to click the colorful 'fedisymbol' to get the original link, which is the one from the instance that the original user lives in.

It's a bug. Not sure if it'll get fixed anytime soon, though... the guy who runs my instance explained it to me here: https://lemm.ee/comment/171585

Syncing of comments seems to be... sketchy. So many things can cause it to not function, or not appear in a consistent manner. Definitely something that will need improving over time for regular users to be able to understand.