I setup a new server a couple of days ago using the Ansible playbook, and some communities are federating successfully even though they're labeled as "subscribe pending", and others that are not populating even though they're labeled as "joined". See attached image.
Q1: What does "subscribe pending" mean? The Memes and Politics communities shown in the image were setup a couple of days ago, but the content is flowing despite them still saying "subscribe pending".
Q2: Why would a community be marked "joined" without the content flowing? I just subscribed to Lemmy Support about 15 minutes ago, and content doesn't seem to be flowing yet despite the status having quickly moved to "joined".
Q3: How can I check the status of things like this either in the database or in the logs? Looking for some general troubleshooting tips, since the logs for the lemmy Docker container are a bit spammy.
Here's something I noticed in the logs right after I initiated the subscription to lemmy_support:
lemmy-1 | 2024-05-06T22:28:43.257408Z WARN lemmy_utils: error in spawn: Unknown: Failed to parse object https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support/outbox with content {"error":"unknown","message":"Record not found"}: missing field `type` at line 1 column 48
I believe I saw this same issue when I first subscribed to Memes and Politics the other day. What's the best way to debug this?
Thanks in advance everyone, and thanks for all the amazing work.
You can try unsubscribing and resubscribing. The switch to "subscribed" from "subscription pending" depends on the remote server sending you an activity acknowledging the subscription. New instances sometimes struggle initially, because the remote instance has to discover you first and I think there's a race condition where it won't send the activity because it doesn't know if your instance is up yet. (There's an instance sync job that runs periodically to ping all linked instances, and it pauses sending activity to instances that are not considered active. If your subscription is the first interaction, you're not "active" yet as it just learned about your instance)
So what happens if your instance goes offline for a bit? How does the instance mark you as active again? Do you need to post something?