Lemmy Federation

Hi there,

Hope this is the right place to ask.

Recently I've been posting to a community on lemmy.world from my account on the sdf instance. However I've noticed that the posts sometimes don't make it to lemmy.world.

I can see the post in the community when logged in in my sdf account, but if I go the the lemmy.world url in a browser, the post isn't there hours later.

How can I find out what's going on? Like is it an outbound sdf thing or an inbound lemmy.world thing? Is there a log file i can read somewhere? If I can find out which server is broken, who do I talk to?

(Knowing my luck this post won't federate)

Cheers

So this is currently a thought experiment or brainstorming, whatever...

When a community is local, the "home server" for community, that means that the federation is sent out to subscribed servers.

Now it also means that the total subscribe list is only know to that one server... As least I think it works that way, that the subscribe of "home" server is the complete list and everyone else has partial lists.

There is a lot of the structure of a community that offers some data opportunities to Lemmy. For one, a community object can be edited by any of the moderators. and any moderator can Lock a post, Remove a post, etc.

Reddit has a not-often-used Wiki feature, that even basically means more than one person could edit content too. Other than the sidebar of a community, I don't think Lemmy has any concept of multiple people being able to edit a post or a comment. But again, multiple mods can feature or lock a post... so there is some concept of multiple-actors on data.

I think when you get into creating flair / tags and even playlists (multi-community lists), you want multiple people to be able to edit data. Which in Reddit was the Wiki structure.

i know some of it is kind of a waste of time.. because people tend to avoid Wiki and highly favor posting the same repeat questions and content over and over, reposts. But a man can dream, can't he :)

or federation.lemmy as root... allowing:
federation.kbin
federation.lemmy
etc.

And it emphasizes owner/operator/home of community, instance_name (subdomain/domain name).

If anyone can confirm this problem, please do. GitHub issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3588

I started noticing more accidental-duplicate posts where the creator of the post wasn't cleaning up their own dupes, but it seems some internal problem with Lemmy may be at play. I have no idea if it isn't sending it outbound, some kind of problem inbound, or other version interaction. I tested it on two 0.18.2 servers.

A few weeks ago, the topic came up and I commented on Beehaw: https://beehaw.org/comment/361658

Given the beta status of Lemmy, I don't even think it's a great idea to give the appearance of privacy. I think the core purpose of a webapp like Lemmy is public messages.

I think it's a can of worms for server operators to get into the business of thinking they can safely hold private messages between users/strangers. None of the Lemmy instances I've joined have had a "terms of service" or anything like that on SIgn Up, I really think the message should be sent far and wide that Lemmy is about posting IN PUBLIC and that messages are being FEDERATED to peers, even people that you don't know could be collecting the data for a search engine.

With small-time server operators opening up hundreds of Lemmy instances, without giving away their experience or human identity, how can you have any confidence that someone is properly securing a server they only have part-time job to update and operate? Major corporations are having their database stolen, Valve, Sony, Nintendo, health care companies, mobile network companies (AT&T)... you think a low-budget shoestring server by a hobbyist running Lemmy should be held to the same standards as a corporation who has an entire team and services to defend their data?

EDIT: Same goes for putting your Lemmy password into a smartphone app or other third-party client. Why should Lemmy server operators be claiming privacy when you have no idea (and no agreement with) who is front-ending your API? You have a 'man in the middle' right there, with full access to Lemmy logins.

There was a bug in Lemmy where servers with large numbers of subscribers did a SQL query that overloaded the servers. Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world were heavily impacted, given how many new instances have been added with people who subscribe to those big server communities!

From Lemmy.world:

I have been spot checking the comment replication on recent postings and messages are flowing far better.

linked to original post given replication problems with lemmy.ml

" I believe that it is responsible for major increases in CPU and RAM usage and client errors. Because now there are up to millions of async tasks active which are doing nothing but sleeping, and this likely messes up the scheduler. I will rework this for 0.18.2."

I did not cross-link because I suggest comments be on the original posting.

... which server sends when two peer instance end-users reply in comments to each other and neither is on the home server?

lemmy.ml is home to this community [email protected] - if a user on midwest.social comments, which server does the distribution to all the servers subscribed to the community?

If you can point to Rust code in the projects where this happens, please do!

I will be dumping reports in here, fresh at the time of each comment

The count of comments is based on the time of the comment here in this community. New comments can be added after the report is posted. It is also a count of the comments loaded off the server, not just the count at the top of the posting - which can be incorrect.

Posting: https://lemmy.ml/post/1454869

this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not “thousands of dollars” spent.

If anyone is working on such a tool, please speak up. I've got some clumsy Javascript code in the form of a SvelteKit app I named "lemmy_helper" that I am thinking of adding this as a command line where you can put in the URL of two servers for a specific community and crawl postings and comments and try to discover missing ones.

As I understand it, the Federation protocols have no 'bulk copy' ability, no way to send a list of comments and postings and get them all at once. So each individual missing comment and posting would need to be triggered by a search on the server that is missing them?

I propose "lemmy-remote-data-repair" as the working name for this concept code/app.

This bug isn't yet fixed in 0.18 beta?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1370450

I encourage all instance owner/operators to run the query mentioned in the issue and see how many of these 'pending' they have on their server. (FYI, I am RocketDerp on GitHub)

I find it interesting that the PostgreSQL comment table in Lemmy has no concept of which instance the comment came from, nor does it have local flag. Well, a comment row does have the ap_id field, but it is in a format that doesn't really allow you to sort trivially by origin-instance.