I have been posting to a community on lemmy.fmhy.ml for a while now. Someone notified me that since it’s down no one else will see my posts. I assume that only people on my instance can see them. Connect app won’t let me post there but doesn’t tell me why, and I’ve asked about that in its community. The web page lets me post there but doesn’t tell me that the instance is gone. I would never have known if someone didn’t tell me. How am I supposed to know this?
Edit - it was Imaginarymechas@lemmy.fmhy.ml
Edit2 - I think if you’re on the same instance as me, lemm.ee, then you can see my stuff but no one else can.
This is interesting because I had no idea it was even possible to post to a community whose instance is down.
What is it and I’ll tell you what the signs would be to me, but that instance went a way months ago.
My instance must have never cached it. Can’t see it.
I can see 3 month old posts there. Nothing new.
And I’ve been posting 1/day for the last week or so.
I see your posts. From oct 28th
You’re on lemm.ee, just like me. I think that’s the key.
That seems right. I can’t see the posts from my instance.
You can see that an instance/community is gone by visiting the instance directly. In this case at https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/imaginarymechas (which obviously won’t work now, as it’s gone).
Whenever you submit a post to a community, first your own instance saves the post locally, then sends it to the instance hosting the community, this instance then sends it to any other instance with users subscribed to the community. When the hosting instance is down, then that step of course fails, resulting in the post being only visible to members of your own instance.
That’s how I ended up realizing it. Someone told me it was down, so I went to it directly and found that. I wouldn’t have noticed that if someone hadn’t told me. This seems like a bug, to me.
I’m not sure I’d classify it as a bug. Instances can temporarily go down at any moment for numerous reasons, to account for this instances will keep retrying to connect with an exponential backoff. At what point should an instance assume that another instance is permanently gone?
Perhaps a good start would be adding a status indicator to every community with something like last sync: 1 minute ago.
That sounds good. Once it passes a threshold, you can assume something serious is wrong.
