If I visit a community from Feddit and then another instance, the comments often differ. I understand there are some issues with defederation between some instances, but this doesn’t seem related to that.
For example, here’s the post-race discussion on the Formula 1 community on Feddit: https://feddit.uk/post/320484
And then the same discussion on lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/950479
I don’t understand why a significant number of comments aren’t visible on Feddit.
The problem is in the way ActivityPub works. The events are pushed into the queue, but if the receiving system takes too long to process it, there’s a datetime “expiry”
Ah, I’m totally unfamiliar with ActivityPub (never even heard of it until now!). Is the expiry time of the messages totally uncontrollable by Lemmy then?
No, It’s part of the ActivityPub protocol definition
I had a look at the ActivityPub W3C and I noticed the following paragraph:
In this context is 3rd party server a federated server? I couldn’t see where expiry came in but presumably if the pushes are async then the server sending the payload won’t know if it succeeded or not (unless there’s some other mechanism to verify message acknowledgment).
The async doesn’t mean if the sending server doesn’t know. It’s not using UDP lol :) It will retry until it gets a RC 200 or 201. Then stop sending. The asynchronous part is that the receiving instance doesn’t have to import the event into the DB immediately. The received event sits in a special “to import” queue until processed. Each event has a timestamp attached to it. If it takes too long to process the event in the queue, because the receiving server is overloaded, then its timestamp may be considered expired.
E.g. from https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/