I am trying to access portugal@lemmy.pt. For some reason, I can only read old posts. I also tried to comment on one of the older posts and it did not get through to the instance.

Is there anything wrong with the Portuguese instance? Or is it feddit.org? Or maybe is it me? Help please, I am new to lemmy and the Fediverse!

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[–] elvith@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago

Help please, I am new to lemmy and the Fediverse!

Hi and welcome here!

The fediverse means that those communities and users you interact with may be on other servers than the one you are on. Your post reads like you know that fact, so I just said that in case you didn't know this. Like email addresses, the part after the (second) @ designates the server a community (!community@example.com) or user (@user@example.com) belongs to.

A first sanity check is always to just visit that server in your webbrowser. Lemmy.pt looks fine at a first glance. It might have been down when you tried to post or comment, but it seems to be up currently. It could also suffer from non obvious problems behind the scenes (same for feddit.org, but I guess we'd see probably more posts like this, then?).

Another possible problem: Activities in the fediverse between your local server and a remote server usually only get synced when at least one user on your local server is (successfully) subscribed to that community on tue remote server. Maybe no one on feddit.org is currently subscribed to that community, so that you do only see an out of date copy of that data - or lemmy.pt didn't correctly get your subscription? Sometimes servers/users may also have data retention policies and delete data older than X weeks/months (not sure about Lemmy, but on Mastodon, you can set up auto delete in you account settings). This can also be a source of problems when interacting with old content. I'm not sure though, if this is also true for Lemmy in general or lemmy.pt.

There can be problems in the communication between servers, too. I'm no admin here, so I cannot check this.

Also another thing in the fediverse are blocks and defederation. You can (individually for your account) block specific users you don't want to interact with and also whole communities. But the admin of a Lemmy instance can also defederate specific other Lemmy instances,which means no one on that server will be able to interact or access content from the defederated server and vice versa. The domain name and community name of !portugal@lemmy.pt looks innocent enough though to not instantly say "defederation".

So, an admin might give some more qualified answers with access to the logs, but the above might give you some insights and pointers what might be going on.