I don’t really know how to word this question. But, basically, when users reply to my comments, I don’t always see these replies, and not all my comments are visible in other instances. I would have assumed this was an issue with comments not federating, but it seems arbitrary: it doesn’t seem to be tied to any particular instance, it happens with instances where there shouldn’t be any issues communicating with, and it seems to happen inconsistently.
Here’s an example. I asked this question the other day and, as far as I could tell, got no replies (I asked “Whats wrong with Nvida, genuine question?”). From the point of view of Piefed.ca, I got no responses.
Then I happened across my Piefed account on Mastodon, and I see that I actually got three replies, and one of those replies got a reply.
It looks like all these replies are from Lemmy accounts. And they are from instances that I normally don’t have any issues with (I converse with users from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world all the time). So I’m not sure why this is suddenly causing issues now.
Here’s another example. There is a thread about the possibility of age verification being introduced in Canada (I know age verification is pretty controversial here, so just to be clear I’m not advocating for it, but that’s besides the point). Here’s the thread from the point of view of piefed.ca, which is the instance I’m commenting from:
So far so good. But when I look on other instances, such as lemmy.ca and sh.itjust.works, it looks like the last comment has been dropped :
And that’s it, the conversation stops there. At first I thought this was an issue with Piefed, so I checked out piefed.social, but there it looks like none of my comments, not even my first one, show up at all.
I have other comments in other areas of that particular thread, and they all seem to be showing up fine, even on piefed.social.
This is weird because this thread, and both users I was interacting with, were from lemmy.ca. And piefed.ca and lemmy.ca are very closely interconnected, they even have the same mods. So I wouldn’t expect there to be issues federating between them.
So I’m really not sure what the issue is. Could someone please explain what’s going on and how I can fix it?
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. There have been a couple of other similar cases in the last few days, so a pattern is forming.
There’s nothing you can do. Possibly creating a new account would solve it, if my theory about the root cause is correct. Some accounts may have corrupted data that got federated to other instances and now those instances are confused about the validity of your account. This should solve itself over time as caches expire and get refreshed but it’s been 3 days now so they should have by now. Perhaps my theory is wrong.
Anyway I’m monitoring the situation and will be doing more tests as time permits.
Hi thanks. My comments aren’t federating even on this very post (I’m commenting from another account right now). There was an other piefed.ca user who commented on this post and said they were having similar issues but I can’t see that comment anymore now that I’m viewing from lemmy.ca.
I also noticed that when I viewed my Piefed account from different Mastodon instances, the replies and tweets (or whatever the equivalent is on Mastodon) associated with my account were different depending on the instance I was viewing from (which posts were visible and which were hidden changed instance to instance). This is not a concern for me, just including that information incase it’s helpful for you
Edit: just out of curiosity, is this issue limited to piefed.ca users (I just noticed theres a post about it on our main forum) or is this an issue occurring across piefed instances?
This seems like a pretty classic federation issue though. Sometimes comments, posts, votes etc just don’t propagate, because reasons.
