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Can you explain how federation works on protocol level?
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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The easiest way to explain it is that the instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content. For all intents and purposes, a fresh Lemmy server is on an island and all other instances are their own island until someone builds a bridge to them.
The ability of an instance to receive content is dependent on the subscriptions users add to the database. Once the instance is aware of these other places it will begin checking them for updates and you'll see them regularly whether you interact with them or not.
This goes completely against what the average person is expecting and causes a lot of confusion.
Piefed instances now do have a form of this for instance admins to populate new instances.
Admins can:
-pull the lemmyverse data and subscribe to a bunch of communities at once
or
-target a single lemmy or mbin instance, get the list of communities that instance hosts, and subscribe to a bunch of communities on that instance.
Both have some tunable settings to allow admins control over how many communities are followed.
Its not an end-user thing, but it should help with setting up new instances and them not being so 'empty'.
edit: typo
That sounds like a much better implementation of community discovery.