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.
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.
Things do sometimes take a bit to come across, and I tend to get a bunch of posts from a single instance come in at one. It does make a bit of a pain at times as I won't see anything at all from an instance, then my front page fills up with nothing but posts from one community within an instance (that's how I came across this thread).
Not specific to lemmy.ml, I have both a beehaw and kbin account and by looking at threads from both sides I've noticed that sometimes I don't see replies to comments on kbin, it's like not everything gets synced properly every time.
Yes, it proves that federation is happening. Which is great.
But it doesn’t mean that federation problems are not also occurring. I just checked one of my comments to a beehaw post 2 days ago, and it still doesn’t appear there. Things can get lost if federation goes bad, from what I’ve seen.
Also, maybe I’ve been impatient on some instances.
So it seems the issue is intermittent, as other comments have testified. Still might be a problem worth addressing.
But it is a real issue. The regular 'nginx 500' errors on lemmy.ml and other instances are a problem that is impacting federaton, not just webapp clients.