tl;dr: what does it mean to see these two warning/notice saying “This magazine [community] is from a federated server and may be incomplete.” and “This magazine [community] is not receiving updates.”

Hello. I’ve tried to get into lemmy back when reddit did the API restriction and killed access to my favorite Sync for Reddit, and it kind of really didn’t stick.

Now I’m trying to get back into the threadiverse and figured I’d try with mbin now since I’m more keen to have an account that’s seemed to have good mix of “properly” showing and have access to threads and microblog posts.

But some instances of mbin seem to have the one or two warning/notice on top of the community page.

I’ve looked at the community both thru two top mbin instance and through the community’s local instance and yeah the warning is right. One of the mbin instance aren’t synced / updated.

What does it actually mean, and how will it impact my browsing? Thanks.

  • e0qdk@reddthat.com
    12·
    2 days ago

    Communities/magazines are similar to subreddits, but unlike subreddits they can be hosted on servers run by unrelated organizations and still interact. Different instances can and do have different ideas about how things should be run but you can still send messages back and forth unless the admins have blocked it.

    The first message is warning you that you’re looking at a community that is not local to your instance. You might not be able to see all the posts from that community on your instance. For example, there may be older posts that never got copied over from long before your instance first found out that that community exists.

    If I understand mbin’s code correctly, the second message means that no one is subscribed to the community locally, so your instance isn’t getting updated by the remote source any more. You need to have at least one local subscriber to get updates. If you’re interested in the community, subscribe to it.

    I think this is the code that produces those messages if anyone wants to dig into it further: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/templates/magazine/_federated_info.html.twig

    The definitions for the message strings (in English) are here: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/translations/messages.en.yaml

    • JayGray91@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 days ago

      the second message means that no one is subscribed to the community locally, so your instance isn’t getting updated by the remote source any more.

      I see. I saw this mentioned before when I was researching on the threadiverse again recently (is that term still in use lol). It’s no biggie, if that means I can help bring it up to date on that instance, I’m happy to do it.

      Thanks!

  • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    It could mean your mbin instance has been defederated from the Lemmy instance the community is hosted on, or that the community is hosted on an instance that has gone offline. For some reason or another, Mbin used to federate with the community, but it doesn’t any more.

    It could be usful to know which Mbin instance you’re on, and which communities appear broken.

    Also, welcome back! :)

    • JayGray91@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’ve decided to sign up with fedia.io, but somehow still waiting for my application to be approved.

      So I checked with the next biggest mbin instance, kbin.earth. When I checked out !fitmoe@lemmy.world thru that instance, I saw the notice.

      Edit: I don’t think it’s the community that’s broken. It seems quite active. It’s probably like what e0qdk said in another reply.

      • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Did you subscribe to it? Updates from communities are only received if at least one user is a subscribed to them, so you could probably fix this by subscribing. :)

        Edit: So yeah, what e0qdk said!

        • JayGray91@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          2 days ago

          Not yet. I’m still waiting for my registration on fedia to go through. If not I’ll go with the other instance then subscribe to it there. Or I might just do both. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯