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there is something wrong with federation of posts

See e.g. https://piefed.social/communities?search=forward - there are 2 communities listed there, both go to the same place if you click them, and that place has no posts from the last 3 days.

It almost looks like the existence of the second version of that community - changed mere seconds ago at the time of my writing this, except again, when you click the link it doesn't show anything new for several days - is soaking up all the new posts, but since it is inaccessible by the normal means those new entities cannot be accessed.

This is my favorite spot in the Fediverse, so I hope it is addressed soon! That community in particular is doing great work to make the Fediverse fun & welcoming to come to by all us nerds:-).

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  • I've merged the communities now, by moving all the posts from the new copy into the old one and then deleting the new one.

    This bug used to occur several months ago because of some mixing of with upper and lower case AP IDs but it hasn't been a problem until just now.

    • That's wonderful! Now it should properly fill up my Chilling feed once more:-).

      And too with each such issue fixed PieFed will become ever more stable, which is far more wonderful. 😊

  • I've noticed the same happening sometimes on https://feddit.online. I deleted one of the duplicates to fix it. I assumed it would fix it, but based on this report, the community might be left broken.

    I have a hunch, but don't have evidence, that it's possible to add a community that was already added by the seeding routine and so end up with two of the same.

    Oddly, they do have different stats.

    • Yeah and 92 posts from a single community (for the 2nd one, updated more recently) does seem excessive, but then again there has been a HUGE flurry of daily posts there (https://lemmy.world/c/tenforward) these last few days so... actually fairly believable. Especially if edits to a posts' content count towards that stat (I have no idea, just throwing that out there:-).

      Though it is also strange that the 1st community is shown as having been updated a few hours ago. Except... those don't show up, at [email protected]? So maybe those updates are for comments/votes for the older posts, while somehow the newer posts are being slurped into the 2nd community, which then hides them from the end-user's view.

      Anyway I don't know how to take this further to diagnose, but I hoped that bringing it to your attention could be of at least some use!:-)

  • Happy to see that you like Piefed!

    • There is so much to enjoy about the Fediverse, so many flavors of variety to experience and get to choose from!:-)

  • Shit, yeah. I think you're exactly right.

    There's one community, with ID 870, that's in a Topic, but if you look at the host community's most recent post - at https://piefed.social/post/301064 - that's not in that first community (I don't know the ID, but I can see that it's not in a Topic). I don't know how the find the second community just using the website, because https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] only ever gets the first one, that stopped updating 3 days ago.

    It might be that there's a call to 'find_or_create' where 'create_if_not_found' needs to be specified, because it's not being found for some reason.

    • I'm not sure what you mean by the latter - b/c in this case the community definitely exists, so "creating" it if the ID were to ever not be found would lead to... well, it could have lead to exactly something like this, actually? Also, would you really want to pull in posts from a community that doesn't already exist on a PieFed instance? Why even, especially if nobody has asked for it? So maybe instead of find_or_create, just a find_or_ignore?

      But I have zero experience with ActivityPub, federation, or even much threaded-style programming, so I will leave such to you experts to puzzle out the actual solution!:-)

      • so "creating" it if the ID were to ever not be found would lead to... well, it could have lead to exactly something like this, actually?

        Yeah. It's just one theory as to what's happened - something like a 'delete post in this community' has come in, and PieFed hasn't been able to find the community, so it's happily created a new one. I don't know why it would be able to find the community, but I'll look into preventing this kind of occurrence.

        It might not be what's actually happened here: it's something for Rimu to solve really (he has direct access to everything). Edit: ignore me, he's just answered, lol.

10 comments