this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Why do user profiles have different content/history depending on which instance you view them from? And possible bug with searching (futurology.today)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Futurology.today blocks fewer instances (and is blocked by fewer) than lemmy.world https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances so it can't be that.

Search:

I tried to search this community before posting and when I go to https://futurology.today/c/[email protected] then click the search icon in the top right, it loads a search page https://futurology.today/search that is searching the whole fediverse.

So I click on "community -> all" and type in "fediverse" then click on this community, and it takes me to https://futurology.today/search?type=All&listingType=All&communityId=70&page=1&sort=TopAll. I see "&communityId=70" in the URL but the page still says it's searching the whole fediverse.

Are either of these bugs that I should report on github?

If I do a search from https://futurology.today/search?type=All&listingType=All&communityId=70&page=1&sort=TopAll it does only search this community. But if I use the first link it doesn't.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Your instance only knows about users, posts, comments and even communities that it's already been "told about". This is how federation works in general on other Fediverse softwares too, but specifically on Lemmy it means someone from your instance needs to be subscribed to a community in order for new posts / comments to federate.

It's likely the user in question posts a lot in communities that aren't (or at least weren't at the time) federated with your instance.

If there is a post or comment you want to respond to but it's not showing up on your instance you can paste the URL into your search and wait a bit and it should pop up (after a few moments of saying "no results", I know, very slick)

Can't help you with the second part as I'm on mobile and not feeling well so my brain won't parse the URLs, but hopefully someone else can assist ๐Ÿ˜…

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I may not be understanding correctly, but that seems like a huge downside to the current implementation of federation, and especially hurts new and small instances?

Using the user's profile example in the OP, one of them doesn't have comments from !lemmy.world/c/politics, so that means that no one on futurology.today has subscribed to /c/politics, and no results will show until someone does?

I see that https://futurology.today/c/[email protected] loads but the posts are all days old and there's no "top day".

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

That's correct.

In terms of data handling, everything happens locally on instances. So if the instance doesn't have the data, it can't display the data. There's currently no mechanism in Lemmy to backfill communities and user profiles: it starts collecting data as other instances start pushing the data after a user subscribes. No subscription no data. Although I'm sure if an admin really wants to, they could make a script to go fetch and backfill a lot of that data.

The big problem is that's really resource intensive, you're potentially downloading GBs of data from another instance. So I can see how the devs don't want a new instance to bring down other instances with massive data transfers.

Thus, the authoritative view of a profile or community is on the home instance of those. It will never be complete on other instances unless that instance is subscribed to every community the user has been active in. But that's fine you can just go visit the remote instance to browse that data.

I think it's not bad. Users can be active on instances I don't care about or like, but from my perspective and my subscriptions, the user is well behaved. I don't need to know they got 5000 points posting to shitposting meme communities on some fringe instance. It's not relevant to me or my users. I'm fine going to lemmy.world to view a lemmy.world user profile. Or maybe they collected -5000 points from lemmygrad, but on [email protected] they're well behaved and I don't need to be swayed by their negative points from another instance. I'd only care if I was participating on lemmygrad communities, and I would only see it if I'm subscribed to lemmygrad communities.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It is definitely a big downside for a lot of people, yes. And looks like you understood just fine, if you look in the sidebar of that politics community as viewed from futurology.today, the subscriber count reads 0 (because it also only shows the sub count from your instance). That's why new posts aren't being pulled in.

I've seen various discussions among server admins of how to handle it, I think some use a bot to basically sub to everything as a workaround to populate the All feed without real users being subscribed. If your server has a meta community maybe you can ask around there whether they're planning on anything like that?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]