this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023

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No Stupid Questions

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Are some instances/communities closed off from others? (self.nostupidquestions)

submitted 2 years ago by SonNeedGym to c/nostupidquestions

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Still trying to get my bearings here.

My account is through Lemmy.World and when I visit the Movies and TV community through lemmy.world/c/[email protected], I only see a few posts. But when I visit https://lemmy.film/c/moviesandtv, there's a lot more activity.

Did I mess something up in my settings or is this normal? Do I need to have multiple accounts for other instances?

Thanks, y'all.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

So the answer to your original question is yes, some instances are closed off from others, but you didn't mess anything up. Instance A can "defederate" from Instance B, which makes it so that users of either instance cannot see or interact with content or users from the other instance. This is unilateral- even if Instance B does not defederate Instance A, it is still blocked from seeing or interacting with Instance A.

However, with regards to your later questions, you didn't mess anything up. It's simply that federation is not retroactive. When the first person from Instance A subscribes to something from Instance B, the two instances are then federated, and content begins being shared from that point forward. It does not retroactively add old content from Instance B to Instance A. For now, it matters relatively heavily, as instances are being federated constantly, even though the content flow is somewhat light. As content flow increases and new instances begin to stabilize, it will matter less. As time goes on, the content "before federation" will be vastly outweighed by the content "after federation".

This is all somewhat compounded by the fact that lemmy instances are absolutely slammed right now. Kbin.social had to defederate entirely for a while just to keep from crashing. Give it time for the spike to stabilize and it will work more smoothly.

[–] SonNeedGym 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah, retroactive federation makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for your detailed response, it's a great ELI5!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

You're very welcome, I'm glad it was helpful. I'm still learning about all this myself.

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

Sorry if this is a silly question but. Let's say I have an account on kbin, and kbin hasn't been federated with instance B yet. I would need to subscribe to a community from instance B and from that point on they would be federated right? But how would I even subscribe if kbin can't see any communities from instance B before they are federated?

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

It's not a silly question at all, and it's one of the most unintuitive parts of the Fediverse. The most straightforward way is to go to the community you want to subscribe to (you can see a fairly comprehensive list at browse.feddit.de). Copy the URL from that community. Go back to Kbin and paste that URL into the search bar. If it doesn't show up immediately, wait a few seconds then refresh, and it should.

There is some shorthand to how you can search- for example, searching "!(community name)@(instance home URL)" works as well, but Kbin in particular is a bit odd because it uses an @ for both community and instance, instead of the rest of Lemmy which uses the !. Like I said, the most straightforward way is just to copy the URL itself and figure out the shortcuts later.

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

lol ok. so if I'm reading right: members of the Reddit v Mod Refugee's club is giving lemmy and kbin.social the old slashdot effect. And to keep the server from protesting the enormous number of newbies coming. The server admins decided to unlink from other servers who were like: uh what's up bro our instance are being spammed. and kbin.social said: : uuuuh, er uuuh helpme. ok let me turn of content sharing and check the logs.
But you say things should get better?
I'm guessing the specific dates it struggled were around the saturday to monday.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

You’re correct. It’s now back to federation again.

[–] hydra 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

lemmy.world has been defederated at least by beehaw.org. If you want to participate there you will indeed have to make an account in another instance. IDK about other instances though. Also sometimes posts don't propagate to other instances since population here just exploded. Lemmy's software stack is being developed to handle the higher demand better.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

It would be cool to have some sort of federation map, that shows which communities have federated and which have not. Maybe it already exists?

EDIT: After a quick google I found this article

https://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-map-of-fediverse.html

that mentions

http://fediverse.space

which should show which instances are federated. But at the moment it doesn't seem to work for me. Just loads infinitely until "something went wrong" pops up.

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

lemmymap.feddit.de is a map that shows a few things. Clicking blocked shows the corresponding connections. It doesn't show the direction, but hovering over will show you an instances number of blocks. Some of the data could be wrong, though. Last I checked every instance is listed as no downvotes. The defederation with beehaw showed up pretty quickly though.

One note, maybe don't click the 'open' checkbox because that tries to show every connection and blows up my browser!

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

Oh nice, this actually exists. But not very usable - I just get a big cloud of text and it's very difficult to get a sense of what's being shown.

[–] Comrat 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's incredibly fiddly, lol. As a tool for understanding some of the fediverse's concepts I've found it marginally useful

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

Ah, for that, yes. But for checking status of certain instance connections, not really.

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

@Hedup Try https://lemmy.world/instances

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Ah, thanks. Looks like beehaw.org is still federated with lemmy.world, but just in one direction since at https://beehaw.org/instances lemmy.world is in the blocked list.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

@Hedup Yep. They defederated yesterday. https://beehaw.org/post/567170

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

Then they aren’t federated and likely won’t see posts, right? If instance A defederates from Instance B, no matter what instance B does, they don’t talk.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

@MadCybertist @SonNeedGym @hydra @Hedup Yep. They might seem like there talking but you will be talking to yourself. They have to federate to be able to talk and see all there comments and post. you might see some stuff now cause its cached but once they reboot or whatever you won't see anything

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

They do talk, but only in one direction.

This post explains the mechanism comprehensively.

https://lemm.ee/post/60220

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm no expert here, but I believe Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world means that people on Beehaw don't see content from people on lemmy.world, and people on lemmy.world can see but can't contribute to content on Beehaw. If lemmy.world defederated Beehaw, it would go the other direction.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant by defederation in one direction.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Some instances are defederating from other instances due to the increased moderation workloads. This will hopefully improve once better moderation tools exist.

It could also be a technical issue, some instances are not configured correctly to federate at the speeds currently needed. This post on lemmy.ml details how to increase federation speed to handle the influx of new content.

Other than that, it could be servers are overloaded and federation back logs exist. I'm not aware of any other issues hampering federation at the moment, but they could definitely exist.

Hopefully this all clears up in time with support from the community.

[–] mwlczk 5 points 2 years ago

Could be, that they are out of sync. Maybe overloaded. Not enough capacity/bandwidth?

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