I have been posting to a community on lemmy.fmhy.ml for a while now. Someone notified me that since it’s down no one else will see my posts. I assume that only people on my instance can see them. Connect app won’t let me post there but doesn’t tell me why, and I’ve asked about that in its community. The web page lets me post there but doesn’t tell me that the instance is gone. I would never have known if someone didn’t tell me. How am I supposed to know this?
Edit - it was Imaginarymechas@lemmy.fmhy.ml
Edit2 - I think if you’re on the same instance as me, lemm.ee, then you can see my stuff but no one else can.
That’s how I ended up realizing it. Someone told me it was down, so I went to it directly and found that. I wouldn’t have noticed that if someone hadn’t told me. This seems like a bug, to me.
I’m not sure I’d classify it as a bug. Instances can temporarily go down at any moment for numerous reasons, to account for this instances will keep retrying to connect with an exponential backoff. At what point should an instance assume that another instance is permanently gone?
Perhaps a good start would be adding a status indicator to every community with something like last sync: 1 minute ago.
That sounds good. Once it passes a threshold, you can assume something serious is wrong.