As it stands right now, it looks like we have to just judge based off of how old posts are to see if we can still interact with a community.

Bonfire just instituted a "Federated" flag in their alpha. I think this could be useful.

You mean like if there's a community called !cats@example.com and your home instance no longer federates with the instance example.com?

If so, I'll add that to Tesseract as it sounds useful.

This is already in nightly, you can see it on the test instance here https://voyager.lemmy.ml/c/photography@lemmy.ml

The best tool I know of is the Federation Checker, but something like it should definitely should be built into clients.

Notably, Beehaw is defederated from .world and sh.itjust.works, while dbzer0, quokk.au, and anarchist.nexus are defederated from feddit.org.

Are you the creator of Tesseract? I love it except it doesn't save my settings or my favorites and multi-communities. I'm not sure why and I've checked in the last 2 weeks. It's been doing it a long time.

this would be an amazing addition! It would help avoid the disconnect between de-federated instances/communities

Make sure you visit in a browser aince apps wouldn't have implemented an in development feature.

PieFed does this.

That's a handy tool, thanks for posting it. Do you happen to know how the lists are sorted? It's not alphabetical.

Not sure how; it's also not by defederation date, otherwise feddit.org would be at or near the bottom of the list for dbzer0.

Added :) I also disabled the "Create Post" button if the community is on a defederated instance even though, technically, you can still post to your instance's local copy (it just won't federate).

Edit: This only works one way. i.e. it can only know if your instance is defederated from the community's. If the community's instance is defederated from yours, there will be no indicator because there's no way to do it without a remote lookup which is both unreliable and inefficient at scale.

How does this work anyway, and does it match with Lemmy's approach?

I noticed crust was saying my dev instance was not federating anymore, which was neat. It was because I don't leave my dev instance online all the time 😁

It looks like this - https://piefed.social/c/adultswim@lemm.ee

Thanks, I mean, how does this work in the backend?

I feel like there should be an "are you alive" federation activity in activitypub, as well as an "I'm back" activity.

Servers go up and down enough that maybe it should be part of the spec

A heartbeat activity! Or maybe a ping.

I like it! Maybe I'll write an FEP for it, lol.

Oh :)

Once per day a request is made all instances to retrieve the list of their admins. If that request fails then they're flagged as 'dormant'. If dormant for 5 days, flagged as 'gone forever' and then PieFed doesn't try to federate with them again and all their communities have that warning on them.

If any Activity arrives from a dormant / gone instance then it's restored to full operation.

That's amazing to see, Regardless if it's only one direction, that should still help wonders, thank you!

It doesn’t, however, save any settings beyond your device. I’m working on a way to securely save those to whatever Tesseract server you use but don’t have it implemented yet.

Thank you for explaining that. I clear the cache quite often. I haven't tried to save the favorites in a bit because I thought it was tied to the settings. Changing the settings each time isn't a big deal, but saving favs kind of is. I'll give it another try since it's pretty great.