Generally that is true, but when you access a remote community for the first time, Lemmy attempts to backfill several posts from the community. This is limited to only posts, so comments and votes are not included in that. You can also “resolve” a post (or comments for that matter) on an instance from its fedilink (the colorful icon you see next to posts and comments), so when someone links to something elsewhere, a lot of apps will try to open (by resolving) it on the current instance instead, which can also result in posts or comments showing up, even when there isn’t a subscriber. Resolving can also be done manually by entering the URL in the search. This seems to not always be that reliable to work on the first try though, so it can help to try again if you have trouble resolving something on the first attempt.
I think there is also something updating community information in the background from time to time, I’m not sure if that only happens under certain conditions or in regular intervals, and I’m not sure whether that fetches new posts at that point either. If it does, it could explain new posts appearing at daily or so interval but without any comments and votes. Backfill should probably only happen initially when discovering the community for the first time though.
Oh wow, again, thank you so much for taking all this time to explain. This is definitely not so easy to use as email! But getting slightly better over time. Ironically I have more experiences with what you are saying on PieFed than Lemmy, but I now see that it’s not something specific to PieFed as I had assumed (well, some tiny bit of it is, but more in terms of the placement of the button than the back-end functionality).
In fact the more time I spend with it, the more I fall in love with PieFed, especially as I realize that the vast majority of problems with it are also shared identically with Lemmy instances, such as Discuss.Online that has typically been extraordinary reliable over the last year (perhaps 99.9%, unlike StarTrek.website whose reliability is closer to 97%).
When it improves its web UI to work better with posts with more comments, and adds user mentions and an API, it is going to be superb.:-)
Generally that is true, but when you access a remote community for the first time, Lemmy attempts to backfill several posts from the community. This is limited to only posts, so comments and votes are not included in that. You can also “resolve” a post (or comments for that matter) on an instance from its fedilink (the colorful icon you see next to posts and comments), so when someone links to something elsewhere, a lot of apps will try to open (by resolving) it on the current instance instead, which can also result in posts or comments showing up, even when there isn’t a subscriber. Resolving can also be done manually by entering the URL in the search. This seems to not always be that reliable to work on the first try though, so it can help to try again if you have trouble resolving something on the first attempt.
I think there is also something updating community information in the background from time to time, I’m not sure if that only happens under certain conditions or in regular intervals, and I’m not sure whether that fetches new posts at that point either. If it does, it could explain new posts appearing at daily or so interval but without any comments and votes. Backfill should probably only happen initially when discovering the community for the first time though.
Oh wow, again, thank you so much for taking all this time to explain. This is definitely not so easy to use as email! But getting slightly better over time. Ironically I have more experiences with what you are saying on PieFed than Lemmy, but I now see that it’s not something specific to PieFed as I had assumed (well, some tiny bit of it is, but more in terms of the placement of the button than the back-end functionality).
In fact the more time I spend with it, the more I fall in love with PieFed, especially as I realize that the vast majority of problems with it are also shared identically with Lemmy instances, such as Discuss.Online that has typically been extraordinary reliable over the last year (perhaps 99.9%, unlike StarTrek.website whose reliability is closer to 97%).
When it improves its web UI to work better with posts with more comments, and adds user mentions and an API, it is going to be superb.:-)