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LemmyRS: Meta @lemmyrs.org lemmyrs @lemmyrs.org

Federation, access and general concerns

I've had a few questions about trouble accessing other communities from here.

First and foremost, I request you to be patient, lemmy is...alpha software at best imho. There's 200+ issues on github right now and very few maintainers. No one expected things to take the turn they did within a matter of days, but here we are :)

Biggest known issues:

Websocket support is being reworked

This is out of my hand and I can confirm that its busted. I tested locally and the current main lemmy backend branch is incompatible with lemmy-ui branch. Can't even login if you set everything up locally.

Accessing communities from other instances is flaky

Good news is that there is shoddy workaround. Say you want to access c/gaming from beehaw.org. Enter the full url https://beehaw.org/c/gaming in your search, it won't show up, click search a couple times then wait a sec, then enter just gaming and it pops up magically.

No high quality mobile apps

There's jerboa for Android and mlem for iOS. Both are under heavy development. Thankfully the website works fine on mobile...mostly.

PS: I'm not a lemmy maintainer, just a hobbyist self-hoster and professional Rust developer trying the fediverse as much as y'all are :)

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5 comments

  • lemmy is…alpha software at best imho.

    lemmy_server development team needs some Database Management Experts to identify the key SQL queries and optimize them, possibly denormalize data and suggest wheres application caching can be done.

    It looks to me like /communities list is fetched from SQL every time a user brings up that page, that data could be at least cached for 2 minutes in the Rust code. Or even add a trigger to generate a flat table when a new insert is done (addition of a new community).

    So far, there hasn't really been but a couple people looking at the SQL problem of scaling:

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877

  • I've seen this between other instances, so it's just just here but... my subscriptions to comms on lemmy.ml are showing as "Subscribe Pending" including [email protected] which has been like this for days. However, I still see the posts show on my homepage, and appear to be able to view and interact.

    So I have two questions:

    • What does subscribe do? e.g. are my posts visible on lemmy.ml I've just tried posting from here and my posts are visible from there so what exactly changes once subscription completes?
    • What's the problem and how do we fix it? (Depending on the answer to #1 maybe the fix is just "ignore it")

    • However, I still see the posts show on my homepage, and appear to be able to view and interact

      It's quite likely that your subscribe went through, mind sharing your findings by looking at the network tab in developer console on your browser.

      What does subscribe do? e.g. are my posts visible on lemmy.ml I’ve just tried posting from here and my posts are visible from there so what exactly changes once subscription completes?

      It simply makes communities on other instances show up in your subscribed feed. Similar to how you join a subreddit (the difference on lemmy is that the subreddit aka community is hosted on a separate instance).

      What’s the problem and how do we fix it? (Depending on the answer to #1 maybe the fix is just “ignore it”)

      My suspicion is that its websocket related, I've seen similar behavior when testing locally. The best you can do is maybe browse github for potentially relevant issues and see if you can help, otherwise please just be patient while things get more stable :)

      • Today seems to work better. TL;DR: to fix subs, unsubscribe, wait 20-60 seconds, subscribe.

        I tried un- and re-subscribing to [email protected] (no pause) and grabbed the websocket messages.

        Unsub

        Sent:

        {
    "op": "FollowCommunity",
    "data": {
        "community_id": 8,
        "follow": false,
        "auth": "x"
    }
}

        Received: op: FollowCommunity response with data.community_view.subscribed = NotSubscribed

        Resubbed

        Sent: op: FollowCommunity msg with data.follow = true Received: op: FollowCommunity response with data.community_view.subscribed = NotSubscribed

        Then I tried on a small sub (to test a theory) and I got two responses, the second being shortly after the first but saying .subscribed = Subscribed.

        Then I retired for !rust with a delay between unsub and resub and this time I got the two responses, the first being the normal NotSubscribed response and the second Subscribed coming 22 seconds later.

        I'm wondering if there's some batch processing or something that I was falling foul of by being too quick.

  • Any rust developers willing to update the API interfaces to the open source lemmy-lite application? https://github.com/IronOxidizer/lemmy-lite

    It doesn't use websockets, it uses the HTTP API