downtime should not result in missing content when the sending instance is lemmy 0.19.0 or newer. 0.19.0 introduced a persistent federation queue in lemmy, which means it will retry sending the same stuff until the instance is available. depending on the type of down, it can also be possible that there is a misconfiguration (e.g. “wrong” http status code on a maintenance page) that could make the sending instance think it was successfully sent. if the sending instance was unreachable (timeout) or throwing http 5xx errors, everything should be preserved.
we are planning to post an announcement about the current situation with lemmy updates and our future plans in the coming days, stay tuned for that. you can find some info in my comment history already if you are curious.
Ah, then something is indeed very wrong if discuss.online is missing so much content from a week ago (I thought after something like 7 days it will simply give up and stop trying), and startrek.website is doing far worse than that even.
Though sh.itjust.works caught up even as we were talking about it so… there’s some hope I suppose. And either way, thanks for any efforts you are doing to help with it - well, on the LW side at least:-).
there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)
downtime should not result in missing content when the sending instance is lemmy 0.19.0 or newer. 0.19.0 introduced a persistent federation queue in lemmy, which means it will retry sending the same stuff until the instance is available. depending on the type of down, it can also be possible that there is a misconfiguration (e.g. “wrong” http status code on a maintenance page) that could make the sending instance think it was successfully sent. if the sending instance was unreachable (timeout) or throwing http 5xx errors, everything should be preserved.
we are planning to post an announcement about the current situation with lemmy updates and our future plans in the coming days, stay tuned for that. you can find some info in my comment history already if you are curious.
Ah, then something is indeed very wrong if discuss.online is missing so much content from a week ago (I thought after something like 7 days it will simply give up and stop trying), and startrek.website is doing far worse than that even.
Though sh.itjust.works caught up even as we were talking about it so… there’s some hope I suppose. And either way, thanks for any efforts you are doing to help with it - well, on the LW side at least:-).
there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)