this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
419 points (99.8% liked)
BestOfLemmy
7156 readers
49 users here now
Manual curation of great Lemmy discussions and threads
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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...
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.