there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)
there is indeed a cutoff. there is exponential delay for retrying and at some point lemmy will stop trying until it sees the instance as active again.
there is also a scheduled task running once a week that will delete local activities older than a week. downtimes of a day or two can generally be easily recovered from, depending on latency it can take a lot more time though. if an instance is down for an extended time it shouldn’t expect to still get activities from the entire time it was offline.
Although the example I mentioned earlier is only 6 days old, so if the cutoff is 7 days then that point should not have been reached yet.
That post also says “Comments are disabled.”, so now I wonder if something special is going on with it, which either caused the comments to be disabled or perhaps the disabling of comments (for whatever reason? I didn’t see anything happening inside that looked remotely contentious, but all the posts submitted around that time seem to have had that happen to them? perhaps a new mod learning the ropes, maybe even fat-fingering buttons unintentionally?) caused federation issues specifically with that content. On the other hand, many other examples abound, even if this were not a great example on its own.
But it is a quite striking one: the original post still has 185 upvotes, when viewed from Lemmy.World it has a handful more, but when viewed from discuss.online it is still far behind at merely 97 upvotes, and when viewed from StarTrek.website still has just the default 1 upvote… and zero comments visible underneath it. At this point if looks like if the delay lasts for one more day the situation will become permanent for that post.
And I’ve already decided to abandon the Startrek.website instance due to constant issues like this - especially if a post takes a day or two to federate, or almost worse it does federate but then the comments cannot make it back from LW to the STW instance for me to be able to respond to them (as has happened before), then on that instance I am essentially out of the loop wrt my own postings on Lemmy, unable to respond to what I can’t even see, at least there on STW where I have a login account, although I can see it on LW where I do not.
I really hope that the upcoming 0.19.6-7 helps make usage of smaller instances more viable as we continue this experiment in federated Lemmy.:-)