Are posts supposed to be exactly synced across instances?
I’m very new here but I decided to check and compare the posts in a community on lemmy.world (where I have my account) and that same community on the instance where it resides and the posts were almost all completely different! Is that how it’s supposed to work or are they supposed to be synced? Sorry if this is a noob question, I’m new here
I don’t know if this is the same question worded differently, but I’m unclear about what is supposed to be synced when a community gets federated.
Let’s say I’m the first one on my instance to sub to a community on another instance. At first it is of course empty because it hasn’t been federated, but after a few moments the posts, old and new, start to show up. However, existing votes and comments appear to not get pulled in - only new ones created after the moment the community was initially federated.
Naturally, I don’t expect votes, posts or comments from blocked users or instances to sync. But the rest should be IMO - at least lazily (e.g. only when you visit a post do comments and votes on it get pulled in).
I've been working on a bot, and when things are working it synchronizes almost instantaneously, including edits to posts and new comments. Any significant delay should be rare.
There are a bunch of reasons why things might be out of synch - load issues, software compatibility (lemmy.world is still on 0.17.4 while lemmy.ml has upgraded to 0.18), bugs... It helps to keep in mind that Lemmy is barely more than beta at this point.
No, communities on different instances will not have the same content. This is one of the features of the fediverse.
Each instance can have it’s own /c/memes and they won’t conflict. So, there could be lemmy.world/c/memes and lemmyverse.org/c/memes and they could each be different with different content and rules. If you want to see each instances ‘memes’ community, then you will need to subscribe to them individually from your home instance. Once you do that, the ‘memes’ community will be ‘cached’ on your home instance and it will show up in everyone’s feed on your home server.
In that case, you should see pretty much the same content. The only reason I could think they would be different is if you are the first one to subscribe to that community on your instance, then not all the posts will show up. You home instance only starts caching a community when someone subscribes to it and you may have been the first. Other than that, I have seen reports of people saying that the posts aren’t the same, but usually it’s a few missing here and there. Same with comments.
Right now its a bit of a mess while things are quickly developing. Ultimately, federated communities should look the same across the fediverse, with a slight delay.
There are some caveats to that around defederation.
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