I'm learning about the Fediverse and am confused about how federation is supposed to work. I understand that there can be communities with the same name in different instances, with different content. But I also understand you can subscribe to another instance's community. For example, there are sysadmin commnunities at lemmy.world, lemmy.one, and beehaw.org (among others). If we focus on one specific community, let's say [email protected], we can find that community from any of the instances. If I go to each instance and look at [email protected] from each one, I can see the same pinned post is at the top of each one instance's view ("Calling all /r/sysadmin reddit refugees!" by DarraignTheSane).

Great!

However, if I look at that pinned thread from each of the three instances, the comment stream is different. The post itself is the same, but the comment thread is a mixed bag. Some comments seem to appear in multiple instances while others only in one or two, but never all three

lemmy.world shows 11 comments lemmy.one shows 6 comments beehaw.org shows 4 comments

On lemmy.world, the second newest comment says "Nice! It feels like home." This comment also shows up on lemmy.one however not on beehaw

The newest comment on lemmy.world says "yeeey" but doesn't appear in any other instance's view of [email protected]

This is just one specific example. Are you not supposed to get the same content, when looking at the same community, regardless of what instance you are logged into when viewing it? Or am I missing something?

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[–] deweydecibel 40 points 2 years ago (18 children)

That's the idea, but the reality is turning out to be very different with defederation. The result is two users looking at the same post see different content, which is not a great look for an aspiring reddit replacement, frankly.

[–] timespace 20 points 2 years ago (9 children)

I think the multiple communities of the same topic across different instances is a mistake honestly. Information/discussion should be concentrated, not spread about a bunch of places.

I read on here they are working on a method that would allow communities across instances to merge. I hope that happens.

Imo, federation should mean the same communities are replicated across all instances. If an instance wants to house its own content, they can maybe make a community that isn’t replicated to all the others but accessible nonetheless by everyone (ie Piracy community, maybe not every instance owner wants to replicate that to their instance).

I dunno, the bifurcation of communities just seems like a mistake and less efficient than everyone in the same place sharing knowledge and ideas.

[–] Mettigel 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

We need a lemmy client that has the option to "merge" communities of different instances on the app level.

[–] andobando 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ive been thinking about how to do this but the issue I see related names don't necessarily mean the same type of community.

/c/latex on one community and /c/latex on another can be VERY different things, so you need to let people create their own groupings, but that seems like too much work.