I’ve been monitoring, checking whether my posts or comments appear on external instances, including mastodon, and it doesn’t seem to be happening.
See a prior post of mine where I provided some specific examples: https://lemmy.ml/post/1310621
But generally, it seems you could go through my profile and check any post/comment to an external community.
Obviously this is frustrating to me as a user.
But big picture here is whether this is a generally problem for lemmy.ml as a whole. Other instances seem to be federating just fine, but perhaps something has gone wrong with this server or there’s a bug that has been tripped here that might occur on other instances too.
Edit thanks for all the replies and confirmations of federation working!! Really! Polite and helpful, wonderful to see … hope I didn’t come off as whiny in this post.
I still think there are problems and maybe things getting lost.
Eg: a post on which I commented, viewed on lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/1361008, and the posts original location on beehaw https://beehaw.org/post/639764. Mine is the oldest so sorting by old should show it, or in the case of beehaw, not. And just to clarify, lemmy.ml and beehaw still federate.
EDIT2 Did another test, commenting on an external post and it went through immediately. So it seems the issue is intermittent, as other comments have testified. Still might be a problem worth addressing.
Something we will need to adapt to is potential latency between posting something on one instance and it propagating across other instances.
Usenet had similar issues back in the day, where it took some time for the nntp servers to send batches of posts to each other, then pass them along to the next server.