I noticed that when I view this post for example on lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/291005 and on dataterm.digital: https://dataterm.digital/post/54221 that both of them are the same post but with a different number of votes and comments.
I believe this also leads to different sorting of the all feed in these instances. Why is that and can it be fixed? Is it even a bug?
I even saw while having both posts open that on lemmy.world a new comment got added in realtime but not on dataterm.digital
Federation can get messy when you start to compare instances between each other.
- For one some instances disable down votes, so may count differently.
- Then you might see delays in synchronisation for whatever reason.
- Finally, federation & defederation. suppose you have instance A, B, C, and D but instance A has blocked C. Users on C comment in and upvote content on D. Instances A&B will download a copy of the stuff posted by D users, but only B will have upvotes contributed by C. Therefore, different upvotes counts.
And that’s just what I am aware of.
Ok so in my case from your possible reasons it can only be a delay in synchronisation because dataterm.digital is not disabling downvotes and is also not defederated from lemmy.world and vice versa.
But it’s still still weird and a bit confusing.
The upvotes could come from more than just those two places. If lemmy.world and dataterm.digital don’t have identical global instance blocklists, one may still be blocking more upvotes counts han the other. Hence why my example had more than two instances.
Good overview, thanks!