How does federation work?
How does federation work?
27 comments
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Thank you. As a newcomer I find this very helpful.
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So what about instances that block other instances? I.e Beehaw. Will they still receive updates?
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wait... so if one of us follows an NSFW, we all get to see boobs? noice!
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It's dumb that someone needs to interact with community in order for it to federate with your instance. Like, how are you supposed to find it in the first place? It makes it difficult for communities to grow on instances that are not mainstream which makes decentralization useless.
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I just did some math and assumed there are 700 (some instances are blocking other instances) instances and 12 000 communities. 700*12 000 = 8 400 000, users across the platform need to copy url of community and paste it into search this many times to make the platform fully federate with everything. Numbers were taken from here: https://lemmyverse.net/
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this number is only completely relevant for someone on an instance all by themselves or with no communities at all. And discounts instances that are or will de-federate either partially or fully. It also assumes some need to be a part of all 12,000 communities. I think tools like you linked solve this issue anyway. I personally believe to a certain extent every community being federated to every instance kind of defeats the purpose of federalization.
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In order to avoid this restriction you would need a global instance discovery mechanism, which is extremely hard to implement without a central server that keeps a list of all instances in the network. And if you do implement instance discovery through a central server you really are losing the whole point of decentralization.
Additionally, it's good that each instance does not federate with everyone else by default. If it did, it would have to process all activity and keep a local copy of all the content in the entire network. This would be insanely inefficient, and make it prohibitively expensive to run even a tiny instance with 1 user and no communities.
Decentralization isn't useless if you can't immediately see everything in the network, come on... We're just spoiled by centralized services.
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you would need a global instance discovery mechanism
I don't think you do. Instances should merely reach out to other instances it's federated with periodically to get a list of communities and some of their metadata. Ideally, they could ask all of those other instances to notify it when a community is added, modified, or deleted, and then store that metadata.
That should be pretty easy to implement, and maybe it already has, idk.
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Ummmm... All you need is some bots on each instance that automatically will interact once with communities known on lemmyverse.net and boom, you have unlocked full federation for every user on those instances. You are not losing any privacy through that, it just skips the steps where user has to manually index a sublemmy before it federates and makes platform more usable.
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"has anyone from my server interacted or searched for the post by it's URL" is misleading. I struggled with this yesterday. Turns out you have to search in a very specific way.
In both kbin and Lemmy, you can't just go to the community's URL (which is utterly bizarre). You must search the full magazine name. In Lemmy, you weirdly need the
!in front when searching it to find it. In kbin, you don't need that, but you do need to search the magazine in the "neutral" search mode, not magazine search mode (lol wut?). Actually, in Lemmy you also have to use the "normal" search field and not the community search field.And of course, both have a discovery issue. People want to be able to search a partial string like "hobby" without having to know what instance their community might be on or if the full name might be things like "hobbydiscuss", etc. They should not need a separate tool to do this search. That's just a barrier to entry.
Anyway the whole thing is a usability barrier that needs to change. It also makes smaller instances actively harder to use, which is a bad incentive. We don't want people to experience small instances as "buggy" (even if it's working as intended).
Anyone currently trying to create a sub should have an account on every major instance and subscribe to their new sub to ensure it shows up in the search. And yes, that is just completely silly (and unscalable beyond the biggest instances).
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It should have a search function similar to browse feddit which would then add a community, this way it would be much faster and simpler to subscribe to new communities
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In Lemmy, you weirdly need the ! in front when searching it to find it
This hasn't been my experience on Lemmy. I'm regularly able to use for example !anime_tiddies@madeup.server or https://madeup.server/c/anime_tiddies in the search bar and it resolves it both ways. Sometimes you need to wait a few seconds for it to populate though.
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I will simply post /c/animetiddies and wait for the server architecture to unbreak itself until my link becomes valid. Since that is obviously the way it would be.
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most people on the internet have way too smooth brain to comprehend this
therefore Lemmy is complex and scary
27 comments