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Federation Questions (dataterm.digital)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello! I hope this community is the right place to post this. I just had a quick question about federation; I'm trying to set up my account and follow some larger communities like those on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org. When I subscribe to one of those communities from Dataterm, is the entirety of that instance (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org) then federated with this instance? Or just the specific community (e.g., /c/gaming, /c/technology, etc)?

Also, how come some posts have different upvotes or comments depending on the instance theyr're viewed from? For example, this post: Dataterm Version, lemmy.ml version has a huge disparity.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

definitely a good place to ask this!

My linited understandign based on Lemmys docs (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_getting_started.html) is that only the community you subscribe to will federate:

If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:

New posts, comments

Votes

...

That should explain the missing content as well: Lemmy only fetches a portion of a community at the time of subscribing, and only the content created after the initial federation will be sent to us - you can manually force a refresh by getting the link to a comment on the remote instance, and searching that on our instance - that'll get all the data about its parents, but that's admittedly pretty inconvenient. The process is described in more detail in the docs linked above!

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

Thank you so much, that clears it all up nicely!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It also might help to understand the fundamental logic behind why that would be the case, which is simply, that dramatically reduces the amount of network resources eaten up, without impacting user experience.