There is the same problem on reddit, so they brought it here too so new users won't be disoriented (/s)
Didn't that have something to do with shadow bans on Reddit?
Are you and OP on the same instance? If not, the phantom comment could be from an instance federated with theirs but not yours.
I accidentally made a post that has -3 comments.
This happens because Lemmy does not count the actual number of comments that there are under the post, but instead there is a counter per post. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not seem like the counter is every synced with the actual count of comments.
I think I noticed that if a commenter deleted their comment then the total comments would go down by 1. On a post with only one comment that also got deleted, it made it show as -1 comments.
Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.
If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.
This could be due to federation. Maybe they.are federating with servers that you aren't.
But Reddit also had a lot of this and people always blamed shadowbans.
comments removed by mods would always show up in the count.
idk why they didn't just fix that, it made people crazy for no reason.
It's a distributed system, by its very nature no single universal "truth" exists. That is to say, you can very much see differing counts of ~anything. Or different threads. Or anything, really. There is no way to keep everything consistent, ever.
Do you have a client that shows top comments with a time frame like “last 6 hours”? Maybe the comment is older than that.
Is it sync? If any case, this kind of questions are usually better in the app community
I doubt it is a federation issue. The number of comments will be worked out by the number of comments in the local DB. So the count won't include comments not received.
As to why they're not showing, as mentioned above, hiding bot comments, or perhaps deleted comments still appear in totals (not sure about lemmy, on kbin deleted comments have their text changed to indicate they were deleted).
Being the only person on my instance subscribed to certain communities on other instances, I am pretty sure it is a federation issue. When I look at the comment counts for the same post on two different instance accounts, they are not the same. They often share the same comments, but not all of them. Sometimes the number shown below the post reflects only the comments from the instance you're viewing it on, sometimes it shows all of them.
For example, looking at the Baldur's Gate 3 community on Lemmy World when logged on to Lemmy World, the top post has about 36 comments but counting them in the post there are only 30. 3 of those comments are mine, and they aren't being shown to my Lemmy World account. When I view it from Yiffit, only my 3 comments appear, while it also says there are 36 total. According to the subscriber count, I am the first person on Yiffit to subscribe there, and that was about an hour ago.
Different comment counts between instances is a federation thing, yes. But showing a number of comments different to the comments shown on the same instance, not.
There are reasons for missing comments, especially on communities from lemmy.world right now. But that's not what is being reported. A federation message for a post does not contain the number of comments (and that would be a totally pointless property to send). It's also quite common that certain comments don't make it over federation.
The screenshot is showing a comment count without comments, that means the instance has one comment locally but for some reason is now showing it. That's not a federation thing.
I have seen this happen entirely contained on a single instance (community and my account on the same instance) I don't have bots blocked.
So I suspect something is funky somewhere, will try to see how it displays in other apps(and kbin etc later)
