How can mbin/kbin users subscribe or even just reach a lemmy community?

Hypx , 2 months ago

I've noticed that a large number of communities on Lemmy.world aren't visible here. You only get a 404. I've noticed this when looking at US state communities:

https://fedia.io/m/washington@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/oregon@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/illinois@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/georgia@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/indiana@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/florida@lemmy.world
https://fedia.io/m/wisconsin@lemmy.world

And I'm sure there are others. What's weird is that some are visible, but others are not. There doesn't seem to be any pattern that I can see.

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

I’ll take a look

Hypx , 2 months ago

Thanks.

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

Ok. I don’t know why this works, but if you search for the magazine (ie search for oregon@lemmy.world) it’ll return a result. After that, the links you posted starts working.

Hypx , 2 months ago

Yes, it's coming up now, but no content is being federated. So it is unfortunately showing up as an empty sub.

eruraindil , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Remote magazines only get new posts from the point in time when they are created locally. It won't pull old posts off the originating server.

Update:
Maybe not. I thought that's how it works but I see content in the Florida one. Curious. I don't know then. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Update 2: comment from e-five could explain how old posts show up on new communities.

Hypx , 2 months ago

It should receive data from any activity at the other community. The problem seems to be Fedia not receiving data from certain communities.

It's not just the state communities. There's a lot of communities that are missing posts. Even ones that happened recently. For instance: https://fedia.io/m/netsec@lemmy.world

And I've noticed some servers aren't federating anything, like lemy.nl: https://fedia.io/m/nieuws@lemy.nl

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

I am not sure what is going on with some of the lemmy.world communities - some do seem to be having issues like netsec, while others like https://fedia.io/m/news@lemmy.world are humming along very well. I'll keep poking at it.

e-five , 2 months ago

I mentioned in the adjacent post but if you do see magazines acting oddly, it could be there are no local subscribers. Hopefully we get a UI fix in soon with the PR I had mentioned, because it's a bit of a bad user experience now. (I noticed world from lemmy world on debounced's instance was getting no posts, or rarely a post with no likes, and subscribed, and suddenly everything came in fine.) So probably a good idea for people, if you want to see posts from somewhere, make sure to subscribe.

(This was technically always true, but a while back admins were auto subscribed so a magazine would always have 1 subscriber. That changed, and that change was even backported to kbin by ernest, so it should be like that back in kbin too for new magazines.)

e-five , 2 months ago

Make sure to subscribe to communities you want. It's not just searching for it and loading it, but if there are no local subscribers it won't get updates (and the last subscriber unsubbing would put it in this situation).

This became a bit harder to tell ever since mbin switched to showing real subscriber numbers rather than local like kbin has. There is an active PR to try to address this issue so users are able to tell when data isn't coming in

Hypx , 2 months ago

Thanks. That seems to resolve the issue. Though, for a lot of smaller communities, no one is going to subscribe to them here, effectively making them invisible here.

e-five , 2 months ago

I don't completely disagree, hopefully the PR I linked, once complete, will make it a lot more obvious to people when this scenario occurs. I think from an instance owner perspective, they wouldn't want to constantly be paying the overhead on communities no one has an actual interest in viewing (edit: this isn't worded well, so forgive me, obviously people may want to view it but not have it show up in their sub feed, so perhaps another action item is a way to split subscription lists, which I think was already requested), as it has a very real financial cost to them. But I will keep this in mind, I meant to investigate how lemmy works (whether they also require a subscriber, I mean they do because this is how AP works but they might make a fake user or something, I never had a chance to look, but I'd be curious what tools they have to stop incoming messaging for when an instance owner wants to save bandwidth)

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

The Florida one does because I followed it and there has been posts since then

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

actually, I'm wrong - the posts that appeared after I followed it are weeks old. I can't explain that.

e-five , 2 months ago

It looks like someone from the remote liked it recently, which, and I'm channeling Benti here because I'm not as good at the AP side of things, announced to subscribers which brought it in here. At least that's my best guess

AchtungDrempels , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I can't seem to get a result for bicycle_touring@lemmy.world

I searched for it in magazines. Do i need to search for it elsewhere?

edit: Oh yeah, i guess i needed to search from just the main search. Found it.

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

it may be related to the ongoing federation problems. https://fedia.io/m/french@sopuli.xyz is working now for me. there are no posts in it yet on our instance because no one had subscribed to it until now.

jerry Admin , 2 months ago

Also, I checked the source and there have been no new posts since. I'll keep an eye on it.

ciferecaNinjo OP , 2 months ago

Thanks for the investigation and tips. I was able to see it by querying the substring you mentioned.

I didn’t even think this thread herein posted. Got the 500 error a couple times when posting here and in mdev, and gave up. I forgot that error 500 often happens /after/ the task executes, hence some dupe threads.