this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Ghost of Lemm.ee? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) by CascadiaRo@lemmy.zip to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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At the beginning of last month, a crosspost to a lemm.ee community showed up in my feed - and it would seem that it showed up in mine alone.

I commented, but nobody else did - and nobody seems to have upvoted or downvoted the post either.

IIRC lemm.ee’s closure is older than this account.

If anyone has any insight, I’m a bit curious to know how and why this could have happened.

Otherwise, behold and regale this weird thing that happened for me!

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[–] e0qdk@reddthat.com 36 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Looking back through your history, that's a post by a user local to your instance. You can see it because you're on the same instance.

If I understand how federation works correctly, posts don't go directly to the instance a community is on when they are made. They are created locally on your own instance, and then federate out if/when they can. Since you're both on the same instance, you can see the post and interact with it, but the post and your comments are (presumably) stuck in a queue trying to federate to the now defunct instance. Since lemm.ee is gone, it can't federate out, so other people don't see the post/comment on their instance.

I think that's what's going on.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 11 points 4 hours ago

Deleted my comment because you said it better.

And an addendum to this behavior, dunno how aggressive Piefed and Lemmy are for pulling information, but I've noticed interactions keep making posts and the skeleton of the community propagate/federate. And albeit rarer, in fediverse softwares that allow following, doing so to someone that interacts with older posts also helps pulling these derelict posts.

Also, while the search function can't pull posts from when the instance was active, it can pull comments to those posts and that are from still active instances, which then pulls the post and community skeletons.