Content not being fetched when a community is searched
I just set up my lemmy instance today (yay!). I am noticing that when I search for communities, the community is being fetched, but the posts, comments, votes, and pretty much all the other data is not always being fetched. Probably around 2/3rds of the time no data is fetched aside from the community itself. Sometimes one or two posts which may be years old, and maybe a couple of comments.
Is this a known issue or is this perhaps the product of a mechanic I am not understanding? From reading the documentation here, I was under the impression it should fetch 20 posts, and I would expect it to get the comments and votes for those posts as well.
Is there any known fix or workaround for this? Is there a way to trigger downloading the posts in a community manually or retry fetching the data?
From what I gather (I don't run an instance), the posts can take a while to fetch, the comments don't get fetched at all (only new ones will be synced) and votes are kind of a mess and their display partially instance-specific.
It's weird because some old comments are being fetched. Usually with no votes, as far as I can tell, but I haven't looked too closely.
It seems like when a community is novel to an instance and someone subscribes, it can take a few hours to pull down a copy of all the posts. Maybe pull down is the wrong word, but sometimes I'll be browsing new/all and dozens of posts from a new community will start flying in.
I believe a user on your instance needs to be subscribed to the community if you want your server to pull posts and comments. I recommend you set up an account with no admin privileges and use a tool like Lemmy Community Seeder to get that account subscribed to all the top communities.
EDIT: just realized this post is 16 days old. Gotta fix that sorting algorithm!