`Subscribe Pending` shown for all federated subscribes

[dessalines]

@Nutomic I've noticed this exists for all federated subscribes, even ones that happened in the past.

[hanubeki]

Cancelling "pending" subscription and re-subscribe worked for me, except for narwhal.city one (which is lotide)

[informapirata]

L'annullamento dell'abbonamento "in sospeso" e il nuovo abbonamento hanno funzionato per me, ad eccezione di narwhal.city one (che è lotide)

With Mastodon and Pleroma the problem is solved by removing the follow and putting it back on again. But with Misskey it doesn't seem to work

[Nutomic]

These are actually marked as pending in the db now. Which is strange because this is the only recent db migration that touches the column, and it sets pending = false, not true.

[dessalines]

The only place I can see in the code where it sets it to true, is here, which seems correct.

Maybe there used to be an issue with accepting a follow, and the UI didn't reflect this for some reason?

Either way, I'm not sure if the correct solution is to do a DB migration to correct those, or ask people to re-follow all their federated communities.

[Nutomic]

Maybe an old Lemmy version used to write subscribed: None in case of success.

I guess its best to ask people to refollow if it bothers them, otherwise we risk causing even more problems.

[JackFromWisconsin]

I guess its best to ask people to refollow if it bothers them, otherwise we risk causing even more problems.

Does "Subscribe Pending" still act as a normal subscription?

[Nutomic]

If it worked before the upgrade then it should still work fine. Lemmy is only displaying the status wrong.

[SiskoUrso]

Just started an instance today and having this same issue. Is this only graphical issue and you are indeed subscribed?

[Nutomic]

@SiskoUrso If its a new instance then that suggests that federation isnt working properly. Go through the troubleshooting steps from documentation.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/troubleshooting.html#federation

[SiskoUrso]

@SiskoUrso If its a new instance then that suggests that federation isnt working properly. Go through the troubleshooting steps from documentation.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/troubleshooting.html#federation

Guess I'm not sure where its going wrong, testing with the commands in the Federation troubleshooting seemed to all return a valid response.

I am using NGINX Proxy Manager , I have custom locations setup for /api, /pictrs, /feeds, /nodeinfo, /.well-known all pointing to the correct ip and port 8536. Looked over the nginx template provided in another post but not sure how to use that in NPM.

Everything else seems to be working except this , as far as I can tell.

Any guidance is appreciated.

[Nutomic]

Check the server logs for any errors while following a remote community. You can grep for the domain name of the other instance.

If you can post in remote communities and these posts show up normally on the other instance, then the problem might be that other instances cant deliver their actions to your instance. In this case the other instance should log some errors so you need to contact the admin.

[Zetaphor]

I'm also experiencing this on a brand new instance. Nearly all of the communities I've subscribed to are showing as pending, the total number of comments isn't matching in my instance and theirs, and I was able to get valid JSON from all of the troubleshooting steps.

I'm able to subscribe to one community on an instance, but getting subscription pending for another community on the same instance.

I've checked my logs and am not seeing any errors. I'm also not running a reverse proxy, I just setup with ansible as described in the wiki

[NettoHikari]

I'm in the same boat. No errors in the logs, but "Subscribe Pending" anyway. I also use NGINX Proxy Manager, if that's necessary to point out.

[verymilan]

idk i keep having this on the big ones: lemmy.ml and beehaw (when i try to sub to a tchncs community, not the other way around) – when i try to do the same thing on feddit it almost never happens

[Nutomic]

If it only happens with big instances then its most likely this configuration: https://lemmy.ml/post/1216911

[Daxiongmao87]

I'm having this very issue on my new instance, however it doesn't matter how big or small the community is. Every single one that isn't local is "Subscribe Pending." Comments are 0, and all votes are 1.

I've also went through the troubleshooting steps and I'm getting valid JSON responses.

I am using an nginx reverse proxy.

Communities are being fetched, I can see the posts, but that's it. I changed RUST_LOG to debugging, and i'm seeing no errors. I'm also not seeing a recurring task to fetch hot ranks which I believe is supposed to be every 5 minutes.

[Nutomic]

Try following communities from a few different instances, it could be a problem on the other side. If it works you should see one log line for "send activity" and one for receive activity. You can also try if comments in remote communities go through.

[Daxiongmao87]

Hmm I seem to have subscribed successfully, I'm still getting just "1" on all ranks, and 0 comments. I understand comment aggregation isn't instant. It's an hour for federated, is that correct? And 5 minutes for hot rank updates?

If that's the case, should I not see hot rank scheduled task pop up in the lemmy backend logs every 5 minutes?

Edit: Nice! It looks like it's working now. Well at least I have just received 1 comment that was federated. Glad to at least see some movement.

[Nutomic]

Yes you will only receive new content, not that which was created prior to subscribing.

Closing this issue because it was a problem with the upgrade from 0.16 to 0.17, not relevant to new installations.

[Zetaphor]

Closing this issue because it was a problem with the upgrade from 0.16 to 0.17, not relevant to new installations.

This has been happening on my new clean installation of 0.17.4, installed today

If it only happens with big instances then its most likely this configuration: https://lemmy.ml/post/1216911

I'm still stuck at pending on a lemmy.ml community. My server has 1 user and my worker count is 128. I tried unsubscribing and resubscribing and the issue persists.

https://zemmy.cc/

[Zetaphor]

FWIW, I was finally today able to use the method of unsubscribe-resubscribe to get these marked as fully joined.

The only server I'm still stuck pending on is lemmy.ml communities.

[maltfield]

Yes I'm still having this issue when subscribing to lemmy.ml communities as well. Unsubscribing & re-subscribing still results in it getting stuck at Subscribe Pending and I can't see the comments in some of the posts.

At the time of this bug, The instance I'm on is running v0.17.3 and Lemmy.ml is running v0.17.4

[mirisbowring]

I also have the problem on a clean install. I can Post / comment to subscribed communities, but no new Posts or comments are fetched. Also the logs do not show any helpful information

I get no "receiving Acitivity" after subscribing

[maltfield]

Update: My "local" instance upgraded to v0.17.4 and I'm still getting Subscribe Pending on some "remote" communities whoose instances are also v0.17.4. Unsubscribing & re-subscribing still doesn't change this. And I still don't have full visibility into all the content on that remote community.

@dessalines can you please re-open this issue as it's clearly not yet resolved?

[Zetaphor]

@maltfield Can you call out which servers specifically?

[maltfield]

This problem exists between multiple instances trying to subscribe to remote communities on lemmy.ml

One example is monero.town (v0.17.4) subscribing to [email protected] (v0.17.4)

[Zetaphor]

This is why I asked, lemmy.ml is pretty broken right now and has been for a while. ALL of my subscriptions are working, except for those on lemmy.ml. I've also only intermittently been receiving new content from them. I don't know if this is a problem with the codebase as much as it is with that particular server

[maltfield]

I'd still say it's a bug if the user hitting the subscribe button results in Subscribe Pending that never resolves itself. If the instance is under load and it's stuck in Subscribe Pending for some minutes or hours, fine. But (I'm totally ignorant of the architecture here), the subscription should be queued & retried such that eventually the Subscription "sticks".

Lemmy's communication between instances should be robust and able to gracefully recover from network outages or other faults. Currently this isn't happening, so it's a bug with Lemmy.

[RocketDerp]

On 0.74 with working federation for many communities, isn't just lemmy.ml remote subscribe that is failing, lemmy.world today is also giving me the trouble. It's also odd that if I'm the first subscriber on my instance, Lemmy instantly fetches those first postings and puts them into the local database - but the join/subscribe never gets accepted and new posts&comments do not start flowing. So the remote-server is being reached.

For lemmy server operators, this PostgreSQL query will tell you how many pendings are stuck on your site:

SELECT person_id, p.name AS username, community_id, c.name as community, i.domain, community_follower.published
			FROM community_follower
			inner join person p on p.id = community_follower.person_id
			inner join community c on c.id = community_follower.community_id
			inner join instance i on c.instance_id = i.id
			WHERE pending='t'
			ORDER BY community_follower.published

I suggest we open a new issue on this? Anyone second that?

[chrisafraser]

Im trying to spin up a new instance and am seeing the same behaviour. In my logs I was able to find messages like this for all servers that I cannot get subscriptions working

2023-06-19T20:11:18.426743Z INFO Worker{worker.id=06aa9ebe-1cab-42fb-ac4b-54bbe7954ba2 worker.queue=default worker.operation.id=fe75d47d-f50d-43d6-921f-795aa50a1b68 worker.operation.name=process}:Job{execution_id=83235752-79dd-4e42-a6f5-d6e32c2e95a9 job.id=ed8bcdbd-4e78-464e-9ae0-871f3d79fd92 job.name=SendActivityTask}: activitypub_federation::core::activity_queue: Target server https://lemmy.ca/inbox rejected https://lemmy.my-domain-redacted.ca/activities/follow/c4b74591-767e-42a0-a160-5023e67c77aa, aborting