Intro and Context
Midwest.social is my homebase, but I have two other accounts in different instances. Both accounts are in instances that are federated with this one.
I started a genre film community about a week ago. Yesterday, I logged in to my other instances to see what the community looks like from a non-moderator perspective. They all look different, depending on what instance I’m viewing the community from. Screenshots below:
Screenshots
This is the view of !driveinmovies@midwest.social from this instance. This is how I’d expect it to be seen by anyone that midwest.social is federated with. Is that not correct?
For context, all the comments in the stickied post are from individuals belonging to other instances with which midwest.social is federated. In fact, there are comments from lemmy.ml folks, and I think there’s one from somebody in sopuli.xyz. That may be relevant because of what I see when I go to my lemmy.ml and sopuli.xyz accounts.
This is the view of !driveinmovies@midwest.social from my account on lemmy.ml. Only three posts show up. The comment counts and upvotes are different.
The one on top with zero upvotes was actually posted from the pictured lemmy.ml account. The middle post is supposedly a stickied post, except it’s not stickied when accessed through lemmy.ml. Also, none of the comments appear. Not even my own test comment.
The “subscribe pending” business is new. Several days ago, it said “joined” over there. When I try unsubscribing and resubscribing, I keep getting the pending nonsense.
This is the view of !driveinmovies@midwest.social from my account on sopuli.xyz. All the posts show up, but the comment counts and upvotes are different.
The “subscribe pending” thing here is the same as it is with my lemmy.ml account. It wasn’t there a couple days ago, but now it is. Turning it off and on again doesn’t do anything.
Questions
Only one question, really. Is this as odd as it seems to me? Okay, two questions. Can someone explain why it looks different, based on which instance I’m accessing the community from?
Unfortunately when an instance/community is federated it does not bring any archived posts or comments over. If new posts/comments come in then it’ll get those, but otherwise yeah it’s a bit of an issue since there’s plenty of old posts people will want to be able to peruse when a community is discovered by an instance.
That makes complete sense, but now you’ve made me curious about the post timelines in the screenshots. The pictures are small and I don’t expect anyone to scrutinize busy images that a random person online posts, so here…
That “Sergio Leone Appreciation Post” thread was posted on 12 June 2023, and it’s visible to both my lemmy.ml account and my sopuli.xyz account.
Meanwhile, that “Grindhouse Horror Movie Trailers from the 1970s” thread was posted on 19 June 2023, but it’s not visible to my lemmy.ml account (yet, it is visible to my sopuli.xyz one).
The two posts were submitted by different people, but both of them originated from midwest.social users.
Would this be considered normal, and there’s something about federation that I misunderstand? I was thinking that if stuff from 9 days ago is popping up on a feed, then stuff from 3 days ago would also be popping up, especially if they originate from the same server. Is that wrong?