A few times lately someone has replied to me and I click on their comment in my inbox to reply back. It takes me to the thread, but only shows a parent or sibling comment, not the reply that was in the inbox. But if I go back to the inbox and click on their profile, I see the comment in their history.
Most recently, this happened to a comment from [email protected]. They sent me a reply telling me about a containers plugin in Firefox and I just want to reply back thanking them for the tip.
Is this a real bug, or is it an artifact of how some instances are not federated with others?
Android 10 Galaxy S9
Edit: Link doesn't seem to lead to their account. Am I linking it wrong?
I finally just made an account on kbin.social to get a little more familiar with this whole fediverse thing and see where I want to actually consider home. But for the past few weeks I've been following the redditalternatives subreddit and looking at various instances of lemmy/kbin. I made a post there about noticing that depending on which instance I view a thread from it'll contain a different number of comments despite being the same thread shared with federated instances. I was told that the data sync (not sure the proper terminology yet) is still a bit laggy & buggy so it takes some for the data to propagate to all federated instances and some comments may not sync at all. This is one of my biggest concerns on using fediverse as a platform.
Yeah, I remember either your post or one very much like it. This kind of issue could drive away users who are on the fence about a federated platform, so I agree it's a big concern.
One way to at least mitigate the subset of the problem I'm encountering (if they are related) would be to allow users to reply directly from the inbox, rather than requiring them to click into the thread first.
I'm not sure how this would work on a technical level, but given that the data is visible enough to my client for it to show up in my inbox, I'd think that would provide enough information to allow for a reply function.
I'll keep an eye on the missing comment and see if it populates into the thread within a day or two. Still frustrating, but at least would explain the root cause.