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128

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

162 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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[–] bizzle@lemmy.world 42 points 3 years ago (3 children)

I have my own Lemmy instance running on my home server, but I'm here. "But Bizzle," you may be asking yourself, "why go through all the trouble of configuring your own instance just to wind up on Lemmy.World anyway?"

I'm glad you asked! And the answer is that federation only fetches parent comments. I'm glad Lemmy exists, and I'm going to keep using it, but we need federated sibling comments for this to actually be good, in my opinion.

[–] twitterfluechtling@lemmy.pathoris.de 19 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I would be happy if my locally posted comment showed up on lemmy.world at all :-) (If this one does, maybe I was just impatient with the initial sync or so)

EDIT: Nevermind, I was too impatient :-)

[–] Lantier@lemmy.world 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I can attest sibling comments are meant to be federated (example thread from another instance: https://lemmy.world/comment/97687), but I was here at the very start of this instance and there were federation issues. Posts not showing, comments not showing on other instances. It's all very new so there may be technical issues.

[–] enzyesha 12 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Did you mean that child comments are not federated?

[–] alternativeninja 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I don't think that's correct.

[–] rideranton@fedia.io 11 points 3 years ago

Seeing as we're viewing this from many different instances, it certainly sounds like a configuration issue on their side

[–] bizzle@lemmy.world 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I think you're right, I may have misinterpreted the documentation. I attached a screenshot below.

[–] LookThere@fedia.io 3 points 3 years ago (1 children)

So that's why there were no comments when I searched a post from a remote instance. You need to search the comments individually. It's kinda weird design imo.

[–] Klaymore@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 years ago

once you subscribe to a community all new comments and posts get federated, but yeah if you just search for the post then you can't seethe comments unless you search for them

[–] falconfetus8@lemmy.world 6 points 3 years ago

That sounds like a huge oversight, if so.