this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Lemmy Support

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Support / questions about Lemmy.

Matrix Space: #lemmy-space

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how to know an instance is gone? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have been posting to a community on lemmy.fmhy.ml for a while now. Someone notified me that since it's down no one else will see my posts. I assume that only people on my instance can see them. Connect app won't let me post there but doesn't tell me why, and I've asked about that in its community. The web page lets me post there but doesn't tell me that the instance is gone. I would never have known if someone didn't tell me. How am I supposed to know this?

Edit - it was [email protected]
Edit2 - I think if you're on the same instance as me, lemm.ee, then you can see my stuff but no one else can.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can see that an instance/community is gone by visiting the instance directly. In this case at https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/imaginarymechas (which obviously won't work now, as it's gone).

Whenever you submit a post to a community, first your own instance saves the post locally, then sends it to the instance hosting the community, this instance then sends it to any other instance with users subscribed to the community. When the hosting instance is down, then that step of course fails, resulting in the post being only visible to members of your own instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's how I ended up realizing it. Someone told me it was down, so I went to it directly and found that. I wouldn't have noticed that if someone hadn't told me. This seems like a bug, to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure I'd classify it as a bug. Instances can temporarily go down at any moment for numerous reasons, to account for this instances will keep retrying to connect with an exponential backoff. At what point should an instance assume that another instance is permanently gone?

Perhaps a good start would be adding a status indicator to every community with something like last sync: 1 minute ago.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That sounds good. Once it passes a threshold, you can assume something serious is wrong.