I've been monitoring, checking whether my posts or comments appear on external instances, including mastodon, and it doesn't seem to be happening.
See a prior post of mine where I provided some specific examples: https://lemmy.ml/post/1310621
But generally, it seems you could go through my profile and check any post/comment to an external community.
Obviously this is frustrating to me as a user.
But big picture here is whether this is a generally problem for lemmy.ml as a whole. Other instances seem to be federating just fine, but perhaps something has gone wrong with this server or there's a bug that has been tripped here that might occur on other instances too.
Edit thanks for all the replies and confirmations of federation working!! Really! Polite and helpful, wonderful to see … hope I didn’t come off as whiny in this post.
I still think there are problems and maybe things getting lost.
Eg: a post on which I commented, viewed on lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/1361008, and the posts original location on beehaw https://beehaw.org/post/639764. Mine is the oldest so sorting by old should show it, or in the case of beehaw, not. And just to clarify, lemmy.ml and beehaw still federate.
EDIT2 Did another test, commenting on an external post and it went through immediately. So it seems the issue is intermittent, as other comments have testified. Still might be a problem worth addressing.
Weird stuff is happening with Federation. I was in a huge discussion on a post with over 500 comments, as a kbin user talking primarily to Lemmy users. Since I'm still evaluating Lemmy vs kbin, I decided to go see what they thread looked like from a Lemmy users perspective since it was fairly large. I happen to already have an account on the instance this big conversation was happening on. I cannot find it. I sorted by Hot, Active, even sorted by Comments since it had so many. It's simply not there. And yet, I can see it via kbin, and plenty of Lemmy people can see it because we all commented on it all day yesterday. But the instance that actually hosts the community it all happened on doesn't show the post at all.
Strange things are afoot in the Fediverse.
Yea ... AFAIU, each community is duplicated or mirrored on every instance that has at least one subscriber. And that mirror can function on its own, even once federation ceases. For instance, in the case of the beehaw defederation with lemmy.world, there were people on lemmy.world who thought that it didn't affect anything because the beehaw communities they had subscribed to were still there and functioning. In reality, the beehaw communities on lemmy.world were orphaned and only worked for lemmy.world users, as it couldn't sync with its original or main duplicate on beehaw.
What you describe though sounds more funky. I would be surprised if duplicates of a community can sync with each other without going through the original/main community. But that seems to be what you story implies ... interesting!
Any link to the community or clue on how to find the post?