Lemmy.World Announcements @lemmy.world Ruud @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

Some federation issues [solved]

I still see some federation issues:

It sometimes takes a few tries before a remote post or community is found
Remote replies don't show up
Subscriptions to remote communties are stuck in 'pending'

I'll look into that.

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23 comments

Most issues should now be resolved, there was an error in the nginx conf.
- I'm not sure if we expect improvements to be immediate here, or if they require time for replication to kick in, but some observations that suggest things are still a little funky:
  
  There are only two pages of communities listed: https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/2 and not a full two pages. Given the number of federations defined, I'd expect the communities list to be extensive, similar to what we see at https://lemmy.ml/communities/listing_type/All/page/4, though obviously with all the big lemmy.ml communities being listed as remote here rather than local.
  
  Searching for communities still fails. Like https://lemmy.world/search/q/!mastodon%40lemmy.ml/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 should return https://lemmy.ml/c/mastodon and https://lemmy.world/search/q/!matrix%40lemmy.ml/type/Communities/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1 should return https://lemmy.ml/c/matrix but both searches are empty.
  
  Maybe this will self-resolve if replication is churning... but community searches seem not to be sorted yet.
  
  I don't know how communities are added. Is it automatically discovered or only when searched or viewed by users? The search should be much better now I fixed an nginx issue. When I search for Mastodon I get loads of results, including the community at lemmy.ml. But searching by community name !mastodon@lemmy.ml doesn't work. Sometimes it works when you click search a few times, sometimes not at all.
  
  I'll discuss that with the Lemmy admin Matrix channel later, now it's time for bed..
  
  Ok, I've been setting up a bunch of remote subs and I think I have a better idea of the behavior we're seeing here. I should note, I don't know what's SUPPOSED to be happening and I don't know what happens on other Lemmy instances. But I can now see what's happening here on lemme.world and it's consistent but complicated enough to be confusing.
  
  Basically, it seems like the community list at https://lemmy.world/communities is some kind of local cache and it seems to get populated whenever someone searches for a sub with the bang syntax, like !mastodon@lemmy.ml. So you end up with a confusing sequence of events like this:
  
  Time 0:
  
  James visits https://lemmy.world/communities to look in the ALL list for mastodon@lemmy.ml, but it's not listed.
  
  James does a keyword search for mastodon in the community searchbox, the mastodon community is not returned because it's not in this instances community list yet.
  
  James gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing.
  
  Time 1:
  
  Janet visits https://lemmy.world/communities and searches for !mastodon@lemmy.ml using the bang syntax. No results are returned.
  
  In the background, Janet's search causes our instance to discover the community and silently add to the community list. I don't know why this happens, but it happens reliably.
  
  Janet gives up, reports that the mastodon community is missing (even though she actually just added it to the list, she didn't check again to realize that).
  
  Time 2:
  
  Tom visits https://lemmy.world/communities and sees mastodon@lemmy.ml is already there. Reports everything is fine, other people must have been confused or that replication kicked in on its own (even though Janet JUST added it to the list, he didn't see the timing correlation to realize that Janet's search triggered the community being added to our list).
  
  Tina does a keyword search with mastodon, and it returns the community she's looking for.
  
  Janet searches using the bang syntax like !mastodon@lemmy.ml, STILL gets no results even though the community is in our community list. Edit: Since writing this I've been told that lemmy searches that return zero results may actually just not be finished. Maybe I/Janet would have gotten a result here if we waited long enough. Or maybe would have eventually gotten a result even at Time 1.)
  
  So you can see that you'll observe different behaviors based on whether you do a keyword search, bang-syntax search, or browse the community list... and you'll see different results depending on whether ANYONE has searched using the bang-syntax yet.
  
  So the reliable way to subscribe to a community is first to search by bang-syntax, then scan the community list (or keyword search) AFTER the bang-search... and then you'll find your community.
  
  No idea if this weird behavior is by-design, a bug in Lemmy itself, or a problem with the lemmy.world setup. But I'm pretty sure it explains all the weird behaviors we've seen around communities sometimes being easy to find and other times being hard to find.
  
  As a new user on sh.itjust.works this has been my experience as well. It also seems like just pasting the link to the community causes the search to find it as well, which can be a bit more convenient than typing out the bang. Even pasting the link to a comment from a different community procs the search to find it. It is weird that it doesn't show up the first time and you have to redo the search though.
  
  Thank you for the research. I will take this up with the Lemmy devs.
  
  Also stop searching with bangs use the https://lemmy.ml/c/mastodon format
  
  URL searches exhibit the same behavior as bang-searches. Is it documented somewhere that the bang-syntax is deprecated? If you visit any community on lemmy.ml, the bang syntax is how it recommends to search for the community on a remote instance, like in the upper right box of https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy.
  
  The Lemmy project is not well documented and is not close to being settled. I'd consider it beta software
  
  There are 2 searchs that you could be cross talking about. The search on the Lemmy.world communities page and the search in the lemmy.world header (or hamburger menu on mobile)
  
  Are they not the same? They both take you to https://lemmy.world/search/. At any rate, I'm visiting https://lemmy.world/communities and using the default type constraint on that page to search for communities.
  
  They don't work the same in my observations
  
  I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types, that was a bit hard for me to notice at first
  
  I think the difference is one of them auto filters to only communities and one searches for all types...
  
  Yeah, that's true by default. But in both cases, the search results page includes a dropdown of types. The header version defaults to all and the communities version defaults to communities. But they're the same search results page, and you can filter the types however you want on either if you change the value of that dropdown once you arrive at the initial search results.
  
  I don't have insights into how the communities get discovered, though I'm new to the ecosystem too. If I find anything as I'm reading around I'll pipe up. In the meantime I'll try other ways of searching as you've described. Get some rest, cheers.

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