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?

  • lukas@lemmy.haigner.meOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    Cloudflare firewall rule that skip checks for Lemmy API calls

    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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The instance might be very busy and it won’t sync older content from before you subscribed.

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago
    • Federation only sets up a channel to exchange data, very little comes across during initial federation.
    • Subscription only requests that FUTURE posts/comments/votes/updates get sent to your server. It doesn’t do historical backfill.

    If you sub to active communities, new posts will populate in a normal way. You’ll have an incomplete view of existing megaposts that predate your subscription. Click the fedi-link to scope those out on the server that hosts the community. You won’t be able to vote/reply, but you can see what’s there.

    Within a few days, the vast majority of posts will be fully fleshed out. Try browsing by new in the meantime, you’ll see more posts that we created after your subscription landed, and spend less time in ghost-town posts where you’re missing all the comments.

  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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 :)

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • 🇺🇦 seirim @lemmy.proEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m also curious, with my new instance, sometimes it seems like we’re receiving the content we should be, other times not so much.