2y ago

Pending Community Subscriptions

This is probably just a lack of fundamental understanding on my part but some communities I want to subscribe to; I'll hit the sub button, it won't change status for a while, I'll refresh and it'll say "Subscribe Pending"

A couple communities have been stuck like this for a day or so now. But other communities I'll mash the sub button a bit more then it'll switch over to "Joined"

Can communities be setup such that subscribers have to be approved by a comm mod or has my subscription request fallen into the void on the backend somewhere and I should try to subscribe again?

Thanks for any clarifications about this!

38 comments

Hey there! I believe this is just server load related. If you leave the page alone, it will eventually change to ✅ Joined. That has been my experience at least.
Just a wild guess, because I haven't looked at the code / implementation yet in GitHub, but It's very possible they use a message queue to store subscription requests for processing. That is what my the observed behavior would lead me to believe. If that's not the case, the delayed sub would be complete server delay while the request is processing...
- Ahh gotcha that makes sense. Thank you for explaining!
  
  No problem. Man, I should really log off... this totally is indistinguishable from reddit and I might end up spending the entire day here at this rate.
  Also, jealous of your beehaw.org address. My signup got messed up and I don't know my password, and the forgot password link doesn't seem to work.
I've been wondering about this too - sometimes it subscribes immediately, sometimes it gets stuck pending. Hopefully the pending ones work themselves out per the other comments...
I'm noticing the same thing for some (but not all) subscriptions to communities on other instances. I'll try retrying for some of them though, hadn't considered it.
Update: Not sure if I'm just lucky but clicking 'Subscribe Pending' then resubscribing appears to have fixed all of them.
Were these remote instance communities or local ones?
- Remote communities external to my home instance
I also have this problem, but it's only on Lemmy.ml for me. Literally every other instance I've used, I have been able to subscribe right away. It also doesn't seem to be an issue with server load or federation, as I'm leaving this comment from my account on an instance I'm personally hosting. I can interact with communities on lemmy.ml, but I can't subscribe for some reason. I also don't think it's an issue where it's simply saying "Subscribe Pending" but actually subscribing behind the scenes, as I haven't gotten any Lemmy.ml communities to show up in my feed.
- This is actually not true. I now see that many of the communities showing this message are in my subscription feed.

38 comments