We just deployed the latest version of Lemmy 0.19.2 where the github code includes a possible fix for the outgoing federation issues we have been having.
But lets see before we celebrate. Help us test if outgoing federation seems to work now by making comments, posts and upvotes and see if they appear on other instances.
Of course if the other instances are on Lemmy 0.19.0 or 0.19.1, they could have issues with outgoing federation still until they update.
I haven't seen outbound federation issues (that I've noticed) since the 0.19.2 update. However....not an outbound federation problem, but I've been seeing a number of problems with not having comments from other instances show up in posts when viewed via lemmy.today.
In Jerboa, this manifests itself as a "there is no record of this comment" errors, with visible child comments beneath. In the Web UI, I don't see either the parent or child comment. I don't believe I saw errors like this prior to the 0.19.2 upgrade.
There are presently two comments (a top-level comment from [email protected], and a child from [email protected]). Both comments are from users local to the instance. Both are over two hours old as of this writing.
In the lemmy.today Web UI, no comments are visible (though the post does have a comment count of two):
In Jerboa, when logged into lemmy.today, I can see the child comment, but not the parent comment. In place of the parent comment, there is italicized text reading "there is no record of this comment".
I'm running Jerboa 0.0.55, the latest on F-Droid as of this writing.
I'm assuming that the same problem is producing the output on both, and Jerboa isn't actually a factor in the problems, that the lemmy Web UI and Jerboa just act differently when a comment is "unreadable" (the Web UI hides the whole tree, Jerboa shows an error placeholder specifically for the comments it can't see and then tries to show the child comments), but I do not know this to be true for sure.
EDIT: A second example from another instance (feddit.de, also running 0.19.2):
Nine comments as of this writing, and are visible via the feddit.de Web UI:
I get the "no record" error for several comments (hard to know which ones, since one can't see usernames, but due to the comment tree structure, one can infer that the top-level comment from ShroOmeric and the child from RidderSport are among those). Jerboa only actually attempts to display six comments for this post.
OK thanks for the detailed information! I really hate to see that Lemmy still has federation issues. It seems like one of those core things that would just work by now. But any info and help about remaining problems is very valuable for the developers. I will read through what you said here and see if I can create a github issue from it.
In theory yes, but it would have meant restoring a database backup and losing data that was created between the backup and the restoration.
We were considering it but it took a few days to realize it was a bug in Lemmy, and we always figured a hotfix would come quickly.
Unfortunately it was xmas and new years so it took a while for a fix to arrive. Next time we won't update the instance at such a bad time - lesson learned. :)
Mmm yeah that's tricky. Do all lemmy updates break compatibility with the database? (assuming that's why a backup restoration would have been required)