I've stumbled upon a weird phenomenon here on sh.itjust.works.

A couple of days ago, !opensim@sh.itjust.works was launched. I was able to subscribe to it from Hubzilla, and I know that several people were able to subscribe to it from Mastodon.

Just recently, probably coinciding with the 0.18.0 upgrade the community seemed to have disappeared, just to resurface a few hours later.

Afterwards, I tried to post to that community from Hubzilla. I've successfully posted to test communities on various other Lemmy instances from the same Hubzilla channel successfully. This time, however, I didn't see the post appear, neither on Lemmy itself nor on Hubzilla outside my personal stream. Even 17 hours later, the post appeared nowhere.

@Hyacinth@sh.itjust.works, creator and sole moderator of !opensim, said she couldn't access the community from Mastodon either. She couldn't even find it by searching for it.

I tried to search for it myself, both on Hubzilla and on a Mastodon account I use with a different identity. While I could easily find communities on other Lemmy instances, I could not find !opensim.

Strangely, I couldn't find !main either. Again, neither from Hubzilla nor from Mastodon.

At first glance, it looked like sh.itjust.works either had problems federating with anything that isn't Lemmy, problems other instances don't have, or it had massively defederated or something.

So I created an account here to report this issue. And even more strangely, all of a sudden, I can see posts in !opensim when I'm logged in, even one that was done before the upgrade. When I'm logged out, I still can't see them.

What could possibly have caused these phenomena, and how, if at all, could they possibly be overcome?