This is it. There is a kind of understood, cultural part that some of the other commenters are missing.

There are situations where (traditionally) tipping is expected, and that is at a sit down style restaurant or at a bar. If the restaurant requires you to fill your own drink, bus your own table (clear the dishes), or carry your own food typically Americans do not tip (this would apply to most fast food places, or places as you’ve described where you walk up to a counter). Do most of these places still put out a tip jar? Yes. Do most customers tip? Probably not (check the jar, it might have some token coins or a few dollar bills in it, but it will not be full).

Are you an asshole for not tipping? That depends on what the situation is. Did you just sit down for a 2 hour meal with 10 people and leave $5? Yes you are an asshole. Did you drive through Starbucks or a burger place and not put a couple bucks in jar? You are probably not an asshole.

It was very obvious for me. A post would only have one comment, but then dozens when I clicked to the original instance.

Maybe I’ll try to spin up a brand new one and see if it’s any better.

I ran mine for a couple weeks, and communities I’d been subscribed to from day 1 were still missing most comments on the posts unless I clicked through to their page. Maybe there was something funky with my install, but I used Lemmy’s ansible scripts to deploy so I don’t know what else I could do.

I asked another commenter here the same question that I’m going to ask you.

I was running a my own single user instance, but I had a hard time getting comments to come in to mine. Have you found a good way to get Lemmy to more reliably pull in comments from remote instances?

I would have to browse out to the original instance to see most of the comments, then back to my own if I wanted to comment (if it was under a comment that my instance hadn’t pulled in, then too bad), then back out to the main site to continue reading. I found that process very tedious so I switch back to a more populated server which seems to pull in most if not all of the comments.

I tried out my own, one person instance, and I had a hard time getting comments to pull in. I would have to browse to the original instance to view all of the comments. Have you found a good way to overcome that?

I switched back to a more public instance just because I found the process of going out to view the content, back to my own instance if I wanted to comment, then back to the original again to keep reading the discussion very tedious.

Being on a more populated server seems to give most if not all of the comments directly.