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Federation not working properly?

I subscribed to communities, but my Lemmy instance receives only a few posts, comments and votes. I can see linked instances, but whether or not they sync data feels hit or miss. I'm not quite sure if this is expected. Does Lemmy have a utility similar to the Matrix federation tester?

26 comments
  • Are you on a private instance? It can take a long while for your instance to catch up to current stuff.

    As far as testing federation... you posted to lemmy.ml from your instance... federation is working :)

    • Something is seriously wrong. It's been hours and I looked at 7 or 8 instances, nobody has a complete copy. Your instance only shows your own comment: https://lemmy.saik0.com/post/4283

      The comment you are reading is comment #14 on lemmy.ml

      • Well it's possible that an instance blocks other instances. This also includes things like firewalls and proxy services. I for instance block all Russian and Chinese ip addresses outright. I want nothing to do with either of those countries from a web perspective. It's possible that on their instance they're blocking my instance, or IP so it's not quite populating properly. There's a lot that can go wrong... Doesn't help that lemmy.ml is getting HAMMERED recently.

      • Actually looking at their instance... They're using Cloudflare (I see the email protection injected code). Cloudflare in particular likes to mark ActivityPub traffic as "bot" traffic and block it. It's more likely that lemmy.ml is blocked for that particular instance by cloudflare. Smaller instances like mine probably don't get flagged. So it shows up in their instance just fine... https://lemmy.haigner.me/post/8?scrollToComments=true

        But other instances might have problems talking to them. They need to setup a page rule to allow lemmy traffic through cloudflares bot detection.

    • I'm on a private instance, yes. My subscription to !lemmy@lemmy.ml is still pending, so idk about the federation part.

  • I observed my Cloudflare firewall events under Security > Events. Cloudflare takes actions against instances that use the Lemmy API through Tor since the launch of my instance. I will allow this traffic to see if that improves federation for my instance, somehow. I doubt it as the vast majority of traffic gets through without a Cloudflare challenge.

    Update: WAF rule didn't work. I suspect page rules block the requests before they reach the WAF.

    I whitelist everything under the sun as I only have 3 page rules. Lemmy requires the following paths as far as I saw:

    • /.well-known/nodeinfo
    • /nodeinfo/2.0.json
    • /api/v3 and v1
    • /pictrs

    Update 2: Cloudflare neither blocks nor challenges API requests anymore. But federation is still whack.

  • I'm seeing lemmy.ml communities that aren't replicating posts and comments properly to other major instances.

    Everyone keeps upgrading the hardware, but the PostgreSQL database seems to have a lot of locking issues / concurrency contention with federation and user activity at the same time.

    Example: this posting over on Beehaw is currently lacking the comments: https://beehaw.org/post/536574

    Another site, it is there, but only 2 of the 4 current comments: https://sh.itjust.works/post/74015

  • Testing 1,2,3. It has been 10 minutes since I created comment #6 in this posting, this is now comment #7.

  • Ok, so this at least gives me confidence that the issues I'm seeing around federation may not just be me. One issue I'm seeing is that I'm not confident my comments are appearing on other instances/ or that I'm seeing comments from other instances.

    @fedora, do you see this comment?

26 comments