I've been on Lemmy for some time now and it's time for me to finally understand how Federation works. I have general idea and I have accounts on three federated instances, but I need some details.

Let Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta be four federated instances. I have an account on Alpha and create a post in a community on Beta. A persoson from Gamma comments on it and a person from Delta upvotes the post and the comment.

The question: On which instances are the post, the comment and the upvotes stored?

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Also, all data isn't stored on every Lemmy I stance, only (or mostly I guess) where it is relevant.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Right, which on a side note is most of why I have accounts on a number of different instances and regularly switch between them - because each instance is at least subtly different, since they each have different userbases, and thus somewhat different sets of subscribed and thus federated communities.

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

But if you on instance.alpha subscribe to a community on instance.beta that would federate the community to your local instance, right? Is there something I'm missing?

[–] hitmyspot 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, if you know about that community. However, by browsing the all feeds of multiple instances, you come across communities you weren’t aware of and can subscribe to on any of the instances you have an account on. Assuming, of course, they all federate.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)