I’m trying to subscribe from lemmygrad, but it’s stuck in “Subscribe Pending”, which usually means there was some error. It doesn’t look like either instance is blocking, and the initial posts from visiting the comm did sync. Is there an error in your logs?
I don’t see any errors. Larger instances like the one you’re on get a LOT of requests, so they instead add them to a queue to be processed when they’re able instead of trying to churn through all of them at once. Perhaps lemm.ml is getting a lot of traffic right now, so my little instance is struggling to get federated.
It could just be a time thing. I just made this post to !croak a few minutes ago. Did that federate to lemmy.ml? It’s been a few hours since the original post
I’m sorry for not responding sooner! For future reference, you can always @ me for things like this so I see them sooner :)
Hey! Thanks for looking into this. I posted this from lemmy.ml because I was able to subscribe from this instance. I was also trying to subscribe from https://lemmygrad.ml/c/croak@r1b.it and that’s where things are failing.
As a result, yes, I can see your new post from https://lemmy.ml/c/croak@r1b.it at https://lemmy.ml/post/54201793 but I cannot see it on lemmygrad!
I’ve had enough adventures with federation woes that I wasn’t in too much of a rush to get this sorted, though I’m looking forward to being able to see frog posts everywhere. I did also reach out to the admins on the other side, and will ping them in a day or two if they don’t run across it before then: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/13069086
Ah, you said that clearly the first time – I’m just a dummy… I’m very new to the whole running an instance thing, and my outside technical and self-hosting knowledge is only taking me so far :/ I think I have a few ideas on how to establish that federation link, though. Give me a little bit, and we’ll see if I can figure something out
No worries, I’ve never had the joy of running a Lemmy instance, and that certainly leaves me lacking some perspective/info, but as a user I’ve run across and reported more than my fair share of peculiarities (especially with federation).
At this point, trying to act as an intermediary between 2+ different instance admins to figure out where things are going wrong is a practiced (if not well-oiled) process.
Unfortunately, with two instances involved, it’s always hard to tell where things go wrong, but so far I’ve observed that:
- neither instance has the other blocked
- both appear in each others Linked Instances
- the initial requests to visit the comms did cause some activity to federate (this part has me particularly stumped!)
- there doesn’t appear to be anything in the instance/comm sidebars that matches the lemmygrad slur filter (yes, that would break federation)
- I was successfully able to subscribe from two other instances, which suggests that getting the grad admins to see my post to them & take a peek too is probably necessary to get to the bottom of this one
I’ll see if I can work something on my end, too. I doubt it, but maybe being an instance owner will give me at least a little leverage in DMs.
Are you sure the link you provided to your lemmygrad post is accurate? I keep getting an error screen telling me to come back later. If it is the right link, that could be a clue 🤷
Oh, actually, just learned this: yeah, you got the error page I showed - the link only works when I’m signed in

I’m guessing that’s related to being a Local Only comm!
The one at the very end of the post before last where I said I reached out to them? Yeah, it works for me:

It is a Local Only comm, so you can’t visit it from your instance, but the link shouldn’t get translated to a local link.
What kind of error page do you get? Like this or different?

That error, and I tried through the lemmygrad.ml site itself. Perhaps it doesn’t like that I’m browsing as a guest? Probably not a symptom of this issue
Hmmm… I’ll do some digging and let you know. I’m just commenting this to let you know I’m tracking the issue
Typically you can unsubscribe and resubscribe.
Yep, I have tried that. It’s affecting all 3 comms and retrying doesn’t work, so I suspect something else needs to be fixed first.
Check your subscribed list, they should still be there.
Yes, that is always true when things are stuck in subscribe pending, but since there are zero local subscribers, new activity isn’t federating.



