Lemmy instance which has not defederated with any other instance.
Hi everyone. I have found many ghost comments in posts. Like one of the posts has 300+ upvotes and 28 comments but when I opened it, there were no comments. I tried different Lemmy apps and it's the same in all of them. Which leads me to believe that it has something to do with defederation done by Lemmy.ml. Which instance has all contents readable?
Keep in mind, defederation is bidirectional. You can end up on an instance that doesn't defederate anybody but is being defederated by some major instances and end up worse off. Also, communities are bound to an instance so even if your instance doesn't defederate with another, the instance that hosts the community might, which also doesn't solve anything.
Also lemmy.ml had to restore from backup monday because postgres shat itself, so if the post is from monday or around, it's possible it was simply lost due to the technical problems.
There's also some federation problems with 0.19.0 and 0.19.1, so it's possible it's been attempted to be delivered to lemmy.ml but failed due to load or whatever.
You didn't give any details or examples so we can only speculate. We troubleshoot federation by establishing patterns, like from what instance are the missing comments from, what instance hosts the community.
Addendum: I've also been experiencing occasional ghost posts, and I'm on my own instance, so there might be some stuff going on that's unrelated, because I sure didn't do anything. If they were deleted or retracted I would see them because I'm admin, I see everything.
Last Lemmy version had federation issues - the current one (0.19.2) supposedly fixed them. New threads should be populating correctly now, maybe give it a couple of days and check again?
Or illegal content because of the way content replicates unfortunately. I don't care about people's opinions, I actually want to see the actual, real range of human opinion and ideas, but I worry about content - it's why I would never consider hosting my own instance.
Make sure you go to Settings and select any languages you want to see as well as Undetermined - I had a similar issue which was fixed by doing this.
If that's not it, it may be a delay in comments federating if it's a community you just recently subscribed to, or there could be federation issues. If the post is on an instance that's defederated with yours, I don't think it would show up at all, unless the defederation happened after it was made.
You can check who an instance has defederated with by checking the Instances link at the bottom of the mane page (or adding /instances after the URL). There's also a tool to see what other instances have defederated with a particular one here: https://defed.xyz/