this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Bug reports on any software

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When a bug tracker is inside the exclusive walled-gardens of MS Github or Gitlab.com, and you cannot or will not enter, where do you file your bug report? Here, of course. This is a refuge where you can report bugs that are otherwise unreportable due to technical or ethical constraints.

⚠of course there are no guarantees it will be seen by anyone relevant. Hopefully some kind souls will volunteer to proxy the reports.

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I did a search for communities with “history” in the name. It came back with !history@links.hackliberty.org even though that instance has been down for over a year. If I did not already know of that instance going down, I would just post there expecting my post to be seen, because there is no indicator of when the server was last up.

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[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If your instance federated with the community before it went down there will be a local copy available. The same thing happened with me with !lefthanded@wayfarershaven.eu

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe what we need is an "inactive" value that apps/ front ends can use to display communities that haven't seen activity recently. Maybe any posts or comments in the past 3 months?

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That wouldn’t exactly hit the mark because a ghost community /can/ be active. The problem is that if you have:

  • someCommunity@originalNode
  • nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode
  • nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode

You can see the local copy of nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode if you are on nodeA. But you don’t know it is orphaned and you are in a bubble. People on nodeB can see posts in nodeB/someCommunity@originalNode, but not nodeA/someCommunity@originalNode. There is no signal that you have been cut off, and that your post will only have a local audience.

We already have transparency of activity, but not transparency of scope and reach.

I would even say adding the transparency is just a start. The real bug here is that the fedi has not figured out that nodeA and nodeB need to sync with each other regardless of the parent.