I’m very new here but I decided to check and compare the posts in a community on lemmy.world (where I have my account) and that same community on the instance where it resides and the posts were almost all completely different! Is that how it’s supposed to work or are they supposed to be synced? Sorry if this is a noob question, I’m new here
No, communities on different instances will not have the same content. This is one of the features of the fediverse.
Each instance can have it’s own /c/memes and they won’t conflict. So, there could be https://lemmy.world/c/memes and https://lemmyverse.org/c/memes and they could each be different with different content and rules. If you want to see each instances ‘memes’ community, then you will need to subscribe to them individually from your home instance. Once you do that, the ‘memes’ community will be ‘cached’ on your home instance and it will show up in everyone’s feed on your home server.
that’s what I did. I subbed to (for example) memes@lemmy.ml and viewed c/memes directly on lemmy.ml and it had different content
Right now its a bit of a mess while things are quickly developing. Ultimately, federated communities should look the same across the fediverse, with a slight delay.
There are some caveats to that around defederation.
Ideally yes, posts should be mirrored exactly across all instances.
In practicality, lemmy.world and others are having some outgoing federation issues. Hopefully wrinkles will get ironed out with time but I would expect the issues to get worse over the next few days as the API apocalypse happens.
I’ve been working on a bot, and when things are working it synchronizes almost instantaneously, including edits to posts and new comments. Any significant delay should be rare.
There are a bunch of reasons why things might be out of synch - load issues, software compatibility (lemmy.world is still on 0.17.4 while lemmy.ml has upgraded to 0.18), bugs… It helps to keep in mind that Lemmy is barely more than beta at this point.
I don’t know if this is the same question worded differently, but I’m unclear about what is supposed to be synced when a community gets federated.
Let’s say I’m the first one on my instance to sub to a community on another instance. At first it is of course empty because it hasn’t been federated, but after a few moments the posts, old and new, start to show up. However, existing votes and comments appear to not get pulled in - only new ones created after the moment the community was initially federated.
Naturally, I don’t expect votes, posts or comments from blocked users or instances to sync. But the rest should be IMO - at least lazily (e.g. only when you visit a post do comments and votes on it get pulled in).
