I thought if I subscribed to a community on a different instance, all the participation is the same. However, I have just realised that the comments are different on the communities even though they should be shared imo
Example: https://lemmy.world/c/unresolvedmysteries@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/Active/page/1
https://lemmy.ml/c/unresolvedmysteries
You can see that the same post for each instance has different comments showing. Then, in fact, participation isn’t the same between communities. Is this a bug or correct?
I’d love to help you figure this out, but your second link takes me to a 502 error.
Anyway, my guess is that one instance you’re on federates with certain instances, and one does not. So if you’re on instance A and B, A federates with C, but B does not, so from B you won’t see comments from C. But I admittedly don’t know what the differences are between the comment sections you’re seeing, so I could be completely wrong.
I think it’s either a bug or related to server load. I made a post on this community noting the same thing. It’s like instances are not communicating with each other right now.
I looked at the same post from 4 different instances and got four different results in both comment count and votes.
From the server it was originally posted on (currently at 9 comments): https://lemmy.ml/post/1244889
lemmy.world (8 comments): https://lemmy.world/post/112477
beehaw.org (10 comments): https://beehaw.org/post/542091
sh.itjust.works (5 comments): https://sh.itjust.works/post/79680
I’m not sure about this particular post, but its possible for this to happen.
(This is how the microblogging sector works, so parts of this could be wrong) Imagine a post is made at !example@lemmy.ml and that community is followed by users on lemmy.world and lemmy.one. The post is delivered to each of those servers but comments are not. So if user@lemmy.world comments on the post, the post will be visible on lemmy.world (because they obviously have a copy of the comment since it was made there) and lemmy.ml (lemmy.world has to send the comment there since that’s where the post is from). lemmy.one won’t know anything about that comment
Banned users can influence that, load/lag between instances can cause propagation delays, and your own language settings can mean that some posts are filtered from your view.
Comments are only synced to an instance starting when the first user from that instance subscribes to a community. This is likely the reason you see different comments on different instances.
It’s not really that it’s supposed to happen and more that it can’t really be helped. Since Lemmy is federated instead of centralized, there is no central server to act as the source of truth. Comments have to be replicated across instances; that’s not happening continuously either. So different instances will have different records of community interactions, but they should variously sync, unless a server is blocking content from another server.
