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How does Federation of Accounts work on Pixelfed? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/pixelfed

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I've started to get into Pixelfed these past 2 weeks but one thing I don't quite understand yet, is what content is getting federated and what isn't. Under "Discover" I can see some trending posts from other instances but most are from the one I'm on and most have barely any interactions in terms of comments etc. I'm a bit surprised, as it's supposedly bigger than Lemmy now but I can see much less content and interactions than on Lemmy. So am I actually getting all the content from instances my instance is federated with, or is it maybe just the specific accounts being followed by members of my instance? And are interactions like hearts getting federated or are they just local?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Reposting @[email protected] (I dunno how to tag people here)

Adding servers to the federation list is just white-listing them. It's not actually establishing syndication in any way. You don't syndicate at the website level, you syndicate at the user level.

The way the system works is, a user on your website subscribes to a user on another website, and from that point forward the remote website starts sending your website that one user's posts, addressed to any and all users on your website who requested them. Your website then receives and stories a copy of all future posts from the remote user, and adds them to the subscribing users' feeds.

This subscription is very much like a magazine subscription. Your site does not receive the back catalogue. It does not automatically receive other magazines (users) published (hosted) by the same publisher (website). You only get what has been requested, from the point the request has been accepted onward.

There is no canonical fediverse that you can just see. It's not a centralized system, which means there's no source of truth to tap into. It's a mass, opt-in content syndication technology, where you have direct access to the locally hosted content on the single website you are using. The fact that much of that content originated elsewhere presents the illusion of some centralized whole, but it's just that: an illusion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Thank you! So it is user based. Do you know if that's also the case for things like comments?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Since OP says most of the post are from the instance he's on himself: I have had the suspicion that pixelfed does domething differently than other fedi software as well. My account on pixelfed.social seems to not know about some posts on pixelfed.social existing before I follow a hashtag. People hav posted under that hashtag on my home instance, but my account doesnt see that. Which would absolutely be the case on a mastodon or lemmy instance.