Are you and OP on the same instance? If not, the phantom comment could be from an instance federated with theirs but not yours.
Why do comment counts often disagree with what I see?
Submitted 1 year ago by br3d@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a2a77995-d1ce-4820-9992-98a248c35b5d.png
Comments
the_dopamine_fiend@lemmy.world 1 year ago
athlon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I accidentally made a post that has -3 comments.
This happens because Lemmy does not count the actual number of comments that there are under the post, but instead there is a counter per post. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not seem like the counter is every synced with the actual count of comments.
Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I think I noticed that if a commenter deleted their comment then the total comments would go down by 1. On a post with only one comment that also got deleted, it made it show as -1 comments.
PeleSpirit@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What does counter per post mean?
Also, I always thought that was because they have to “call home” to get updated and there’s time in between.
C4d@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.
If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.
Aux@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because data synchronisation between instances is quite poor.
DavyJones@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Rather imperfect than poor.
masterairmagic@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This could be due to federation. Maybe they.are federating with servers that you aren’t.
But Reddit also had a lot of this and people always blamed shadowbans.
density@kbin.social 1 year ago
comments removed by mods would always show up in the count.
idk why they didn't just fix that, it made people crazy for no reason.
Carighan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s a distributed system, by its very nature no single universal “truth” exists. That is to say, you can very much see differing counts of ~anything. Or different threads. Or anything, really. There is no way to keep everything consistent, ever.
redballooon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Do you have a client that shows top comments with a time frame like “last 6 hours”? Maybe the comment is older than that.
r00ty@kbin.life 1 year ago
I doubt it is a federation issue. The number of comments will be worked out by the number of comments in the local DB. So the count won't include comments not received.
As to why they're not showing, as mentioned above, hiding bot comments, or perhaps deleted comments still appear in totals (not sure about lemmy, on kbin deleted comments have their text changed to indicate they were deleted).
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Being the only person on my instance subscribed to certain communities on other instances, I am pretty sure it is a federation issue. When I look at the comment counts for the same post on two different instance accounts, they are not the same. They often share the same comments, but not all of them. Sometimes the number shown below the post reflects only the comments from the instance you’re viewing it on, sometimes it shows all of them.
r00ty@kbin.life 1 year ago
Different comment counts between instances is a federation thing, yes. But showing a number of comments different to the comments shown on the same instance, not.
There are reasons for missing comments, especially on communities from lemmy.world right now. But that's not what is being reported. A federation message for a post does not contain the number of comments (and that would be a totally pointless property to send). It's also quite common that certain comments don't make it over federation.
The screenshot is showing a comment count without comments, that means the instance has one comment locally but for some reason is now showing it. That's not a federation thing.
runaway@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Says the comment posted 107 minutes in the future, apparently
r00ty@kbin.life 1 year ago
This is a known kbin/lemmy thing. Kbin sends dates with a timezone attached, lemmy expects UTC. I actually keep meaning to set the server to UTC to stop this happening.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Is it sync? If any case, this kind of questions are usually better in the app community
Izzent@lemmy.world 1 year ago
[deleted]be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 1 year ago
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? I'd rather see comments like theirs than responses like yours. I can't find anything in their words that merits your toxicity.
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Damn, do you really to be that aggressive?
Nighed@sffa.community 1 year ago
I think they were just suggesting that it should be discussed in the app specific community as they thought it was an app issue not a federation issue.
Nighed@sffa.community 1 year ago
I have seen this happen entirely contained on a single instance (community and my account on the same instance) I don’t have bots blocked.
So I suspect something is funky somewhere, will try to see how it displays in other apps(and kbin etc later)
Mininux@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
There is the same problem on reddit, so they brought it here too so new users won’t be disoriented (/s)
Entheon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Didn’t that have something to do with shadow bans on Reddit?
XEAL@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Or comments pending of mod approval.