this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
163 points (98.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35258 readers
1326 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

E.g. If I were to share an image of a doggo on lemmy.world and then people from sh.itjust.works upvote it, will it count those upvotes? The answer to this one seems pretty easy to reason that it would be yes.

But what about if i'm on lemmy.world and am subscribed to [email protected] and I see it in my "subscribed" feed? Does this reflect total points across the lemmiverse or will this just show upvotes from lemmy.world?

top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago

In theory upvotes are counted from every server. In practice, there's been some small synchronization issues in the past where servers fail to send upvotes sometimes. It should be better now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Due to how federation works, the federated instance needs to accept and process the activity. Each application can define its own "optional" activity properties, but the activitypub specs define mandatory properties and some optional properties for coherence across the fediverse.

The way lemmy implements this is to use the activitypub-federation-rust library that the lemmy devs built. Through this, activities in Lemmy are sent using HTTP and have a failure retry:

It is possible that delivery fails because the target instance is temporarily unreachable. In this case the task is scheduled for retry after a certain waiting time. For each task delivery is retried up to 3 times after the initial attempt. The retry intervals are as follows:

one minute, in case of service restart
one hour, in case of instance maintenance
2.5 days, in case of major incident with rebuild from backup

In the case of votes, the activity is a "like" - some other federated applications understand this and will accept it, but others won't. For example, peertube does not have a like activity, and I don't believe they would handle it.

However votes are shared across instances. When a user "likes" something from another instance, Lemmy will notify that actor (the page) that the activity (a like) was emitted by another actor (you).

Hope that clarifies things. I'm still learning all this myself so if anyone can contribute or improve my answer, please do!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I think an important take-away from this is that Lemmy pushes changes between instances, it does not synchronize. Instances get out of sync when changes get lost (as you describe) and I don’t think there is a mechanism for the destination to know it it out of sync with its peers.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't actually know how it works so I'll just assert my understanding and if I'm wrong hopefully someone knowledgeable shows up and teaches us both something.

From what I understand, in your described setup, only sh.itjustworks keeps track of the votes on "awesomecommunity". Other instances, e.g. lemmy.world, get the count from the community's home server. Other instances send their votes and comments to the home server, which is responsible for keeping track of everything.

I'm confident at least 20% of that is accurate, give or take 25%.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's pretty much this. So the instance the group is on, is the controller of the group. Posts from that instance or others are sent there and that instance distributes the posts and comments to other instances with users subscribed.

Likes work just the same, you click a like, your instance sends that like to the controller instance and that then sends those likes out to subscribed instances.

It doesn't always happen in real time though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Glad to have your concurrence!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I love your confidence!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

All instances in the Fediverse work based upon the "ActivityPub" protocol. This is true for all Lemmy instances, all Kbin instances, Beehaw, and even Mastodon. If it's in the Fediverse, it's runs on ActivityPub under the hood.

As such, any "activity" that any user from any instance does (I.e. likes/upvotes, dislikes/downvotes, boosts, etc.) Will sync with all other instances provided they are federated, syncing properly, and support the activity in question (not all instances support all activities or process them the same way).

Ergo, in theory, the likes you see on a post will be from all instances that support likes, likewise for dislikes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Eventually yes the upvotes count back to the OP instance but not always instantly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes upvotes are federated. Kbin factors in boosts too, these are also federated within and outside kbin - but not really used on Lemmy. Downvotes, a bit less clear - I think they are federated within/between Lemmy(?) but not with or between kbin instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They're always counted in fedirated servers, but the server chooses if their shown. They can also defedirate and reduce outside intervention, like beehaw, but now they're isolated.

All that being said, if the user account you're using is stored on a popular server, you may just be struggling with the recent stress of the reddit moving to centralized, general servers (which lemmy is not built for).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

upvotes on remote posts get shared too