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YSK that kbin.social is now federating, adding hundreds of communities and ~26k more users content - Lemmy.world (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by dragontamer to c/bestoflemmy

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This "You Should Know" post is top of ~June, for good reason. This post announced the kbin.social Federation/compatibility with Lemmy.

A huge amount of test-posts from a wide-variety of instances came in to test the new federation abilities (including from kbin.social, one of the biggest kbin communities).

I think this post shows the hope that over the long-term, we can get federation across the larger fediverse. I don't know if Mastodon is in the works, but these kinds of posts give hope.

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[–] dragontamer 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t know much about Lemmy and Federation, but is it a bit like the Newsgroups of old (Usenet), where you joined a Usenet service and any posts on any service propagated across all servers?

Yes and no.

Usenet's communities / groups (alt.whatever) were unified. While communities on Fediverse are not. This means that [email protected] is a different set of posts than [email protected].

Like Usenet, the federation model means that individual servers can accept, or reject, other server's traffic. This means that posts aren't guaranteed to be global. (https://Lemmy.world and https://Beehaw.org are having a defederation spat right now, at least while moderation tools are being developed to fix the problems). This should be familiar to any old USENET user, though the younger #RedditBlackout group is extremely confused about federation.

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

Thanks for the clarification. I have another question I hope you can answer. Is it possible to be in an instance that has a federation with lemmy.world and beehaw.org? Even though they have been defederated with each other? I hope my question makes sense...

[–] beanz 4 points 1 year ago

Sure, in that case you can interact on any beehaw post with beehaw users and any users from instances federated with beehaw, or interact on any lemmy.world post with lemmy.world users and any uses from instances federated with lemmy world.

But if a post is created on beehaw and a lemmy.world user subscribes to it, lemmy.world downloads a copy of the post for lemmy.world to interact with which is separate from the original post on beehaw. So you would effectively have access to 2 different versions of the same post, one with comments from beehaw users & federated instance users, and another with comments from only lemmy.world users.

In practice you'd only ever really see the first version of the post though, same as if your account was on beehaw in this example. There's no solution where you could interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world users on the same post from being based on a third instance that's federated with both.