Can you explain how federation works on protocol level? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 days ago by akkajdh999@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Let's say we have lemmy instances A, B, C.

alice from A makes a post "Hello, world" to B. What happens? How is it processed on servers A, B, C and how do users from A, B, C receive her post?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

This goes completely against what the average person is expecting and causes a lot of confusion.

But this is only true if the user looks at the All feed, correct?

[-] FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 1 points 5 days ago

But this is only true if the user looks at the All feed

It impacts what content is available to users at all. The All feed is just the visual representation of what's actively federating.

Let's say you join a new instance for whatever reason with no outside awareness of how the fediverse works. If you try to search the instance for "sportball" and get zero results the natural assumption is going to be that there are no communities and no interest in that topic. The user has no idea that lemmyserver5000.com has a sportball community with thousands of users because no one with those interests ever did the work to get the content flowing in a way that they could access it intuitively. It's a poor design IMO.

The reason I brought it up has more to do with starting a new instance or using a smaller instance. Communities that the instance isn't aware of (via someone previously subscribing) won't show up at all which causes places to appear non-existent or dead by default. Someone trying a federating website for the first time isn't going to know this, so to them, that's all the fediverse has to offer.

[-] Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 days ago

It's a poor design if what you want to do is emulate a centralized social media service.

But maybe we should stop trying to do that.

[-] FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 1 points 5 days ago

Maybe.

But I'd counter that it's prohibitive to growth. People aren't used to turning up at a domain name only to find out 90% of the content can't be accessed without jumping through a bunch of hoops.