there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)
as far as i know, locking a post does not affect voting, only prevents new comments from being federated.
the other example you mentioned, i assume that you’re referring to the inconsistency on lemmyverse.net? i haven’t looked at how that application works, but it’s unlikely to be working with activitypub/federation, instead it’s most likely just connecting to various different instances and using their APIs. i’ve also left a comment over there about that.
i already explained before why these posts don’t see votes on startrek.website - there is no local subscriber on that instance. once at least one person from that instance subscribes to the community it’ll start seeing updates, which includes votes. there has also been a comment by one of the startrek.website admins about the federation issues caused by them accidentally blocking certain traffic from other instances here.
for discuss.online, there does not seem to have been a longer federation delay according to this dashboard, only about 1.5h delay at some point that was recovered from fairly quickly. it is also very possible that the first subscriber to the community on discuss.online only subscribed after the post was created, as the more recent posts seem to be doing just fine with their vote counts when comparing discuss.online and lemmy.world numbers. looking at our database, i can see the first subscriber to that community from discuss.online joined about 5 hours after the post was posted, which would easily explain the partial votes.
I might have a misunderstanding about how federation of posts works: when there are no subscribers to a remote community on a particular instance, I thought in the past that I have seen not only missing votes and comments, but the entire post itself would be absent as well? e.g. if the last subscriber from an instance leaves a community, then it will retain the archived posts but not bring in any new ones, until someone subscribes again (I had this situation with the “just post” community, from discuss.online, iirc). So then I do not understand why I am seeing posts at all for that community on StarTrek.Website, if nobody from there was subscribed to it? On the other hand, I do begin to see what you are saying: every single post there has zero upvotes and zero comments.
Thank you for explaining all of this btw, and for weighing in on that Lemmyverse post as well:-).
Generally that is true, but when you access a remote community for the first time, Lemmy attempts to backfill several posts from the community. This is limited to only posts, so comments and votes are not included in that. You can also “resolve” a post (or comments for that matter) on an instance from its fedilink (the colorful icon you see next to posts and comments), so when someone links to something elsewhere, a lot of apps will try to open (by resolving) it on the current instance instead, which can also result in posts or comments showing up, even when there isn’t a subscriber. Resolving can also be done manually by entering the URL in the search. This seems to not always be that reliable to work on the first try though, so it can help to try again if you have trouble resolving something on the first attempt.
I think there is also something updating community information in the background from time to time, I’m not sure if that only happens under certain conditions or in regular intervals, and I’m not sure whether that fetches new posts at that point either. If it does, it could explain new posts appearing at daily or so interval but without any comments and votes. Backfill should probably only happen initially when discovering the community for the first time though.
Oh wow, again, thank you so much for taking all this time to explain. This is definitely not so easy to use as email! But getting slightly better over time. Ironically I have more experiences with what you are saying on PieFed than Lemmy, but I now see that it’s not something specific to PieFed as I had assumed (well, some tiny bit of it is, but more in terms of the placement of the button than the back-end functionality).
In fact the more time I spend with it, the more I fall in love with PieFed, especially as I realize that the vast majority of problems with it are also shared identically with Lemmy instances, such as Discuss.Online that has typically been extraordinary reliable over the last year (perhaps 99.9%, unlike StarTrek.website whose reliability is closer to 97%).
When it improves its web UI to work better with posts with more comments, and adds user mentions and an API, it is going to be superb.:-)
there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)
I couldn’t tell you the reason for this, but several posts in [email protected] have been locked by a moderator: https://lemmy.world/modlog/959443
as far as i know, locking a post does not affect voting, only prevents new comments from being federated.
the other example you mentioned, i assume that you’re referring to the inconsistency on lemmyverse.net? i haven’t looked at how that application works, but it’s unlikely to be working with activitypub/federation, instead it’s most likely just connecting to various different instances and using their APIs. i’ve also left a comment over there about that.
i already explained before why these posts don’t see votes on startrek.website - there is no local subscriber on that instance. once at least one person from that instance subscribes to the community it’ll start seeing updates, which includes votes. there has also been a comment by one of the startrek.website admins about the federation issues caused by them accidentally blocking certain traffic from other instances here.
for discuss.online, there does not seem to have been a longer federation delay according to this dashboard, only about 1.5h delay at some point that was recovered from fairly quickly. it is also very possible that the first subscriber to the community on discuss.online only subscribed after the post was created, as the more recent posts seem to be doing just fine with their vote counts when comparing discuss.online and lemmy.world numbers. looking at our database, i can see the first subscriber to that community from discuss.online joined about 5 hours after the post was posted, which would easily explain the partial votes.
I might have a misunderstanding about how federation of posts works: when there are no subscribers to a remote community on a particular instance, I thought in the past that I have seen not only missing votes and comments, but the entire post itself would be absent as well? e.g. if the last subscriber from an instance leaves a community, then it will retain the archived posts but not bring in any new ones, until someone subscribes again (I had this situation with the “just post” community, from discuss.online, iirc). So then I do not understand why I am seeing posts at all for that community on StarTrek.Website, if nobody from there was subscribed to it? On the other hand, I do begin to see what you are saying: every single post there has zero upvotes and zero comments.
Thank you for explaining all of this btw, and for weighing in on that Lemmyverse post as well:-).
Generally that is true, but when you access a remote community for the first time, Lemmy attempts to backfill several posts from the community. This is limited to only posts, so comments and votes are not included in that. You can also “resolve” a post (or comments for that matter) on an instance from its fedilink (the colorful icon you see next to posts and comments), so when someone links to something elsewhere, a lot of apps will try to open (by resolving) it on the current instance instead, which can also result in posts or comments showing up, even when there isn’t a subscriber. Resolving can also be done manually by entering the URL in the search. This seems to not always be that reliable to work on the first try though, so it can help to try again if you have trouble resolving something on the first attempt.
I think there is also something updating community information in the background from time to time, I’m not sure if that only happens under certain conditions or in regular intervals, and I’m not sure whether that fetches new posts at that point either. If it does, it could explain new posts appearing at daily or so interval but without any comments and votes. Backfill should probably only happen initially when discovering the community for the first time though.
Oh wow, again, thank you so much for taking all this time to explain. This is definitely not so easy to use as email! But getting slightly better over time. Ironically I have more experiences with what you are saying on PieFed than Lemmy, but I now see that it’s not something specific to PieFed as I had assumed (well, some tiny bit of it is, but more in terms of the placement of the button than the back-end functionality).
In fact the more time I spend with it, the more I fall in love with PieFed, especially as I realize that the vast majority of problems with it are also shared identically with Lemmy instances, such as Discuss.Online that has typically been extraordinary reliable over the last year (perhaps 99.9%, unlike StarTrek.website whose reliability is closer to 97%).
When it improves its web UI to work better with posts with more comments, and adds user mentions and an API, it is going to be superb.:-)