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Your instance connects directly to other instances. All of the lemmy instances doing that with each other is the lemmy network.
Each instance can connect with any other instance unless blocked, but will not do so until someone on your instance follows a community on the remote instance.
In short, there is no way to see everything, and there is no one true view
I thought viewing on the browser without logging in may show everything? Is that not true?
It may show everything that the instance itself knows about.
The "true view" they're saying is like if there's an instance that federates with every single other instance but that's highly improbable
More impossible than improbable. An instance that willingly federates with every other instance would be blocked in a heart beat by many other instance admins, because if they're fine federating with CSAM, nazis and the like, then they're not going to be welcome.
You'll only see what the instance you're viewing has federated with (as well as it's own, obvs)
Couldn't you make a script crawl the lemmy-space with API calls and just add all instances to your private instance?
I mean if it can take the hit it would have it all :-)
You could crawl the Fediverse looking for instances and communities of the sort that your instance understands, but new servers and communities can show up whenever, so you'd have to keep looking continuously. Stuff also gets interesting because different servers have different views of content.
I've seen posts from users on two different servers talking in a thread on a 3rd server asking other users to help proxy messages manually between them because one of the servers was defederated from another and the messages were only going one way between the two users... I'm not sure in that case what the communication pattern was between the three servers (never mind me on kbin.social -- which isn't a Lemmy server at all -- also able to see the conversation), but it seemed like a big headache.
I've manually gone to different instances to make sure my posts show up when I make them; kbin is often pretty bad at getting new photo threads to federate out and sometimes needs a bit of coaxing... Looking at my profile on those instances though shows wildly different thread and comment counts sometimes. As of the time of writing this (before posting this comment) I have 30 threads and 85 comments listed in my profile on kbin.social. lemmy.world shows me as having 30 "posts" (threads) and 78 comments. lemmy.mindoki.com (your instance) shows 0 posts and just 10 comments!
There's also users on Mastodon and Misskey which show up for me as part of the regular experience of using kbin but which are a bit more awkward to interact with from Lemmy, I think? If I manually put in a mastodon.social user's account into lemmy.world's user lookup, for example, I can see some of their posts, but I'm not sure if they would ever actually show up anywhere on Lemmy without manually looking for a user?
Nevermind the other parts of the Fediverse like Peertube and AP-enabled Wordpress blogs and whatever else is out there... You can probably get a decent view of most of the Lemmy/kbin-like communities if you have a good list of servers to scrape community lists from and subscribe to everything you find regularly, but I think you'll still have some problems in practice.
True true. I also forgot about the rest of the fediverse ...
I think what many find confusing is that there is no master lemmy server to facilitate instances finding each other. I know they use the Activitypub protocol, but I dont know what it does.
I also dont understand how torrent clients find each other.