I’ve found the following work-around works pretty well. If you host an instance that’s currently on 0.19.0 or 0.19.1, consider implementing this.
There are two bugs that this helps with:
- Outgoing federation stops after about 6 hours
- Another federation bug which is triggered if the server isn’t running at midnight every night
Work-around:
Create cronjobs that restart the Lemmy container every 6 hours (but not at midnight). The following example is used for a Debian system running Lemmy in Docker.
Type crontab -e into the terminal
Add something like the following:
0 1 * * * docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1
0 7 * * * docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1
0 13 * * * docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1
0 19 * * * docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1
3 1-23/6 * * * docker container restart lemmy-postgres-1 && sleep 60 && docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1
By restarting the container every 6 hours, outbound federation continues to work. There may still be some delays, but everything gets cleared up regularly.
By telling it what time to restart (0100, 0700, 1300, and 1900 as opposed to “every 6 hours”), it avoids restarting at midnight. This avoids the second bug.
My instance has been doing this for enough days where I’m confident that it’s working. You can check your federation status here. Note that it’s normal for there to be 0 up-to-date instances and a lot of lagging instances. As long as they sometimes turn “up to date”, then everything is getting caught up.
I like to do things just off the top of the hour, since top of the hour is when many maintenance crons run. If you’re running a modern cron daemon, you can rewrite that as:
3 1-23/6 * * * docker container restart lemmy-lemmy-1https://crontab.guru/#3_1/6_*_*_*
I figured someone more familiar with crontab would chime in. Thanks for the recommendation!
Edit: I’ve updated my cronjob to https://crontab.guru/#7_1-23/6_*_*_* and I’ll keep an eye out to make sure it works on Debian 12.