At this point, I have 3 Lemmy accounts. One on lemmy.world, one on fanaticus.social, and a third I just created on lemmy.ca. It’s interesting to see how federation works or, more importantly, how it still has some issues to resolve. We know at this point that posts have not been federating between lemmy.world and fanaticus.social. But on the .ca account, this entire NY Mets community is empty. Not a single post appears. I’m posting this to point out the issue, but also to see if this post appears when I switch to fanaticus.
So I will give you the info that I have come across over the last couple months. At least one user from instance A (e.g. Lemmy.ca) must be subscribed to a community on instance B (e.g. Fanaticus.social) for instance A to federate that particular community’s future posts/comments. This does not mean that prior posts/comments will federate. What should happen is that future posts/comments for that particular community should be visible for any user from instance A going forward. Other communities in instance B will not necessarily federate and will each require at least one subscriber from instance A for future posts/comments to show up.
The only real solution at this stage is to make an account on different instances specifically to subscribe to the main communities on the target instance so that users from those instances will have “proper” federation.
Edit: Tagging @[email protected] for visibility on that account as well.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!!
Just FYI, interaction with the prior posts seems to force federation. I went through and upvoted every post in this Community from one of my other accounts. And the Community went from completely empty to fully populated on lemmy.ca. It also helped posts make their way over to lemmy.world.
That is good to know, I’ve never tried that!
Minor correction to that. It seems to force prior posts to federate, but not the comments on those prior posts. Interacting with those comments from other instances doesn’t seem to have the same affect. So prior posts just appear with no comments.
Oh well. Still learning and experimenting.