I’ve been noticing that when I open a page for a post, the upvote counter seemed to bounce around wildly. Figured it was just something to do with the enormous load on the instance(s). However, I just noticed something extra strange and thought the info may help someone troubleshoot and fix it.

I saw a post come in for the lemmy.world community that just got posted less than a minute earlier. I opened it, and saw the upvote counter was something like 745, which seemed odd. Then about 10 seconds later while I was watching, it changed to 128. 10ish more seconds go by, and it changed to 996 (actual numbers were slightly different as I wasn’t trying to memorize them).

It seems highly unlikely that a post less than a minute old would have any of those upvotes. I suspect that there’s an issue where post upvote counters are getting updates with the counters from other posts. When you hover over it, the popup seems to reflect a more accurate number.

Not sure if this is a lemmy.world issue, or a lemmy as a whole issue.

  • 0v0@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy uses a websocket connection to send updates to your browser. What seems to happen is that when you go from the thread view to a post, the websocket still receives updates for all posts, and the upvote counter changes whenever it receives an update for an unrelated post.

  • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I noticed this too. I think this might have something to do with the federation. As you also stated a lot of instances are overloaded right now and I think it shows you the local amount of upvotes first and then the ones from the other instances.

    Edit: I press Post and the upvotes for this post jumped to 996, then 44 and now 154. There’s more going on for sure :)

    • cablepick@lemmy.cablepick.net
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      1 year ago

      I’m on my own instance and I’ve started seeing it. My instance is in no way overloaded. If upvote it goes to the correct number and stays there.

      • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah but your own instance is still communicating with the other instances which are overloaded. The numbers are indeed all over the place and when I press the upvote arrow it doesn’t seem to be working either. Or rarely at least…

  • SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When I make a post or view a post that is new the upvote counter will go to like 50 or more but then go back to the legit number. I’m on mobile

  • danc4498@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m seeing it too. I’ve logged into other instances and do not see the weird count jumping around issue.