There are other issues with comments not syncing across instances that I am seeing with my community. Comments and posts from Lemmy.ml cant be seen by lemmy.world. It didn’t used to be like this prior to the reddit blackout. I think the amount of traffic and the various issues with BE 0.17.4 are likely to blame. I think some Lemmy instances are even still on version 0.17.3 because I believe 0.17.4 has bugged Hot and Active scores, among other issues.

The Lemmy devs just posted a big blog post where they said they are working on the next version (rumored to be 0.18) which is going to bring some substantial changes to the codebase.

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout

Tldr: “At the moment we are urgently working to solve major issues, such as optimizing slow database queries, ripping out the inefficient websocket API, and fixing a major security vulnerability”

So I’m going to chalk up all these issues under known bugs that will be fixed in the next update or worked out over time.

I think this is one of the problems of being distributed: since each Lemmy instance needs to sync changes across other Lemmy instances that its users are interacting with, insert activity into its database, have changes made in its local database (the user deleting/overwriting the comment), and then have other instances sync said change in content - the developers say this is dwarfed by traffic to the local database, but when you’re connecting to instances across the world there is no doubt going to be some latency. I think a few more minutes and this should be resolved; if not, this is a bug beyond my capabilities of my cursory understanding of Lemmy’s technology.

For example: