Federation questions on a new server (leftopia.org)

submitted 6 months ago by insaan@leftopia.org to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

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I setup a new server a couple of days ago using the Ansible playbook, and some communities are federating successfully even though they're labeled as "subscribe pending", and others that are not populating even though they're labeled as "joined". See attached image.

Q1: What does "subscribe pending" mean? The Memes and Politics communities shown in the image were setup a couple of days ago, but the content is flowing despite them still saying "subscribe pending".

Q2: Why would a community be marked "joined" without the content flowing? I just subscribed to Lemmy Support about 15 minutes ago, and content doesn't seem to be flowing yet despite the status having quickly moved to "joined".

Q3: How can I check the status of things like this either in the database or in the logs? Looking for some general troubleshooting tips, since the logs for the lemmy Docker container are a bit spammy.

Here's something I noticed in the logs right after I initiated the subscription to lemmy_support:

lemmy-1  | 2024-05-06T22:28:43.257408Z  WARN lemmy_utils: error in spawn: Unknown: Failed to parse object https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support/outbox with content {"error":"unknown","message":"Record not found"}: missing field `type` at line 1 column 48

I believe I saw this same issue when I first subscribed to Memes and Politics the other day. What's the best way to debug this?

Thanks in advance everyone, and thanks for all the amazing work.

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[-] oleorun@real.lemmy.fan 3 points 6 months ago

Subscribe pending and joined pretty much mean the same thing right now. I think it's a bug but I'm not sure. I do know that Subscribe Pending instances work.

Old posts aren't federated. As new posts roll in, they'll start appearing.

I setup my lemmy log to go to a file as opposed to the console. Then it's searchable, archiveable, etc.

[-] insaan@leftopia.org 1 points 6 months ago

Old posts aren’t federated. As new posts roll in, they’ll start appearing.

Oh, that makes sense, and explains why I have content from the ones I subscribed to a couple of days ago but not the ones I just added. And your reply showed up on my server, and I'm posting and replying from my server, so things do seem to be flowing.

I setup my lemmy log to go to a file as opposed to the console. Then it’s searchable, archiveable, etc.

Yeah, I was going to look into doing that as well. Are there any docs on how to do it, or is it something you did at the Docker level?

[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 3 points 6 months ago

You can try unsubscribing and resubscribing. The switch to "subscribed" from "subscription pending" depends on the remote server sending you an activity acknowledging the subscription. New instances sometimes struggle initially, because the remote instance has to discover you first and I think there's a race condition where it won't send the activity because it doesn't know if your instance is up yet. (There's an instance sync job that runs periodically to ping all linked instances, and it pauses sending activity to instances that are not considered active. If your subscription is the first interaction, you're not "active" yet as it just learned about your instance)

[-] Link@rentadrunk.org 1 points 5 months ago

So what happens if your instance goes offline for a bit? How does the instance mark you as active again? Do you need to post something?

[-] andrew_s@piefed.social 3 points 6 months ago

The error you saw in your logs is due to a recently fixed bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4658

[-] insaan@leftopia.org 3 points 6 months ago

Cool, thanks, I'll either wait for a new release or take a stab at building/deploying myself at some point.

this post was submitted on 06 May 2024

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