Random Community not random and fails every other try (ani.social)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by zabadoh@ani.social to c/voyagerapp@lemmy.world

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On the toolbar, there's a magnifying glass icon that I'm calling search.

I enter the search page by clicking on that icon.

On the search page, there are a number of communities, and at the bottom, there's a Random Community button.

When I click on Random Community, I am sent to !100yearsago@sh.itjust.works

So far so good.

When I backswipe to go back to the search page, and click on Random Community again, I get a yellow error dialog saying "Failed to find random community"

No choice but to go back to the search page.

Random Community again returns me to 100yearsago

Back and Random Community gives me the yellow "Failed to find random community" dialog.

Ad infinitum

Edit: I am using Android v2.9.1

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[-] aeharding@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

It depends on your instance.

This will be resolved once https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4698 is resolved so please give it a "thumbs up" if you want it!

[-] zabadoh@ani.social 0 points 6 months ago

I can see this being very taxing on an instance's network resources, maintaining and sending the complete list of communities that it has access to every time a request like this is started.

How would that even work?

Any given instance only has records of the /c's that its users have joined, and there are likely plenty of /c's that its users have not joined.

What if some instances have disappeared, along with their /c's? There are some zombie /c's out there because of this, and those could really use some cleanup because their content is still in the caches of many instances.

What about de-federation? What happens to de-federated /c's?

[-] Docus@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

It is working fine here (iOS)

[-] zabadoh@ani.social 1 points 6 months ago

I am using Android v 2.9.1

[-] zabadoh@ani.social 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I tried on my iOS device, v 2.9.1 and it's behaving similarly to what I describe in my reply to @pro_user@lemm.ee who told me about pulling down to refresh:

It seems to cycle between "Failed to find random community", !100yearsago@sh.itjust.works , and !categoryiii@lemmy.world - which is a /c that I subscribe to already

but in iOS v 2.9.1 it adds !3dprinting@lemmy.world , and wowthisnsfwsubexists@zerobytes.monster - which returns a "nothing to see here" message, and some Korean NSFW /c that has never come up again after coming up twice.

[-] TopHatExtraordinaire@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I can see the error eventually by clicking search and random a bunch, even without clicking or swiping back. Maybe the random functionality is pulling up a community with bad data or we’re getting rate limited. Not sure!

[-] pro_user@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

If you are on a random community, you can also ‘pull to refresh’ (pull down from the top of the list), which will load a new random community. Does that work properly?

[-] zabadoh@ani.social 1 points 6 months ago

Interesting, I didn't know you could do that!

But it doesn't really work.

It seems to cycle between "Failed to find random community", !100yearsago@sh.itjust.works , and !categoryiii@lemmy.world - which is a /c that I subscribe to already