I don’t understand the modlog behaviour and didn’t find any posts explaining it in a search, so I’m hoping someone more familiar with the fediverse backend(s) can explain it. General answers would be great, but I’ll put the specific context I’m not understanding as well in case that’s relevant:
context
I’m trying to find the reason a specific comment by another user was removed, but the modlog on piefed.zip for that user is empty. I figured that just meant mod actions don’t federate, which makes sense, but I also don’t see the removal in the lemmy.world modlog (the instance for both that user and the community the comment was in). If mod actions don’t federate then I assume it can’t be in the modlog of some third unrelated instance, which seems to rule out all other options and shows my understanding of the situation is clearly wrong in some way. I’m not linking the user or the post to try to avoid dogpiling of the user and/or the mod, and to keep the focus on the question rather than the comment’s content, but if it’s somehow relevant please let me know
Very poorly.
mod logs Imo shouldn’t be used as an accurate source of current information because they very commonly will be desynced/not up to date. But it seems to be by an instance by instance basis, and sometimes even a community by community.
what is supposed to happen is a mod action is performed and then logged. And then instances can then see that action, but it desyncs constantly
as you’ve experienced firsthand, it can be quite useless at times, especially if you’re looking for information that was performed somewhat recently with somewhat recent being within the last couple days.
A person makes a post that violates a rule, the post gets reported, and then a mod removes it. Using a rule from this community as an example:
- This is not a support community.
It is not a place for ‘how do I?’, type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself…
The rest of the demonstration will probably happen later.
I don’t see how this is a “how do I?” type question at all - I read thru the community rules before posting to make sure and didn’t spot anything I felt this post would be violating. I’m asking about the mechanics of mod action federation on the fediverse, not for any sort of support or site specific answers
Sigh, Rule 5 definitely needs clarifying…
There could be federation delay between mod actions. The source code doesn’t make it immediately obvious, but it looks like all activities are delivered to various inboxes, including moderation actions. Workers and polling could potentially make this stochastic.
EDIT: This was looking at the Lemmy source code (in rust). piefed source is in python. It could also be a bug in the interaction between those different implementations
I wonder if the empty piefed.zip modlog is a lemmy/piefed federation issue then? The user account I’m looking at to test this has many mod actions going back years on the .world side, but none at all on piefed.zip. Meanwhile on lemmy.zip, many (but not all) of the .world mod actions are federated so something does seem to be fucky between the lemmy/piefed modlogs.
Either way, there seems to be at least one aspect of the modlog federation that’s very unclear (at least to me) which is why I was hoping someone with more knowledge of it could give a general overview of how it all works lol
Nothing to do with federation. piefed.zip decided not to make their modlog public. It’s an admin setting within piefed. IIRC, it isn’t an option in lemmy.
Ohhh thank you this explains a lot!
Yeah, really solving this will require deeper code spelunking than I did. If you checkout both repos and point a robot at it asking it specifically to trace the modlog federation, you might get a better answer. You could also empirically debug this by setting up a couple of instances, federate them, and see what happens.
