2y ago

Shouldn't all the instances show the same community content?

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 sysadmin@lemmy.world, we can find that community from any of the instances. If I go to each instance and look at sysadmin@lemmy.world 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 sysadmin@lemmy.world

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?

26 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  Having multiple communities in different instances for the same topic is a controversial topic that I haven't yet settled on an opinion about. However, what I'm talking about here is that the content for the same community shows different across various instances. That seems very broken to me
  
  Can't disagree more.
  There's a very toxic dynamic on Reddit that many people don't want to acknowledge. Once a space hits a certain threshold of users, discussions die, and everything switches to bids for attention. These bids don't further anything but further bids for attention.
  
  We need a lemmy client that has the option to "merge" communities of different instances on the app level.
  
  I dunno about this. I REALLY like the idea of fragmenting the whole user base. When a community gets too big it ceases to be a community.
  Why does the whole internet need to see then same content, and be a collective hivemind?
  Whats wrong with the current user size we have on this current community? Id even argue its too big already. If it blows up by 100x we run back to having posts with 10k replies, 20 or so which everyone will read. Its a really dumb system
- I understand how instances that don't federate with another instance won't show content, but I've checked a bunch of instances. Could it be that beehaw, lemmy.one, reddthat, lemm.ee, and feddit.de have all defederated from lemmy.world? They all have a different mix of content
  
  Your confusion is warranted and I don't have a good answer.
  That's kind of the issue. Everyone's vision of content in the fediverse is being filtered by their isntance, and most critically, it's being done in a non-transparent way. Looking at post from beehaw, if you didn't know any better, you'd have no idea perfectly decent comments are being hidden for no reason. Extrapolate that accross multiple instances each with different other instances defederated, and its just creating endless confusion and fracturing the social aspect of a social network.
  
  High volumes of posts, low server bandwidth, or an instance with too few worker processes can just slow down the syncing process.

I ran across an odd delay today. While looking at my main Lemmy.world top page an amateur radio instance scrolled in. I assume someone on Lemmy.World subscribed and the content was synced. I tried to make a post and subscribe, but the comment never propagated. I checked the federation list and everything seemed in order. So I logged into my sopuli.xyz account/instance and that amateur radio server didn’t exist. But I could manually get to it using the /c/community@instance link. About 4 hours later I posted a comment from sopuli - and it showed up on the original instance server almost immediately (I’ve now got three tabs - the am radio instance, Lemmy.world, and sopuli.xyz). Not only that but my Sopuli comment showed up in my Lemmy.world instance almost immediately. The post I made from Lemmy.world still hasn’t propagated to any other server but the post from sopuli propagated everywhere instantly.
I can see a less patient redditor just giving up entirely with this kind of inconsistency, even ignoring that there are (for ex) three amateur radio communities and one kbin magazine, not all of which are visible even on federated instances.

Beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world, so after that time point no new lemmy.world content is pulled to beehaw.org
Not sure why the lemmy.one isn't up to date as they haven't defederated with lemmy.world. It should be the same?
- Why did beehaw defederate from lemmy.world?
  
  Here is their post about it:
  https://beehaw.org/post/567170
  
  Here is their explanation: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
  I think this are all expected problems, and sooner we experience them sooner we will find solutions.
  It would be much worse if everything went find for years and than problems start poping up.
  Basically we are all experimenting, if you take a look at other comments all problems you have discovered are technical issues. Some are bugs, others are missing features.
  We will het there, but not in few days. It takes time to develop good software and federation is quite complex piece of software.
- Yeah I saw that about beehaw, so that's not unexpected. It's actually what prompted me to look at how the community appears differently there, and then to look at how it appears elsewhere. Pick any lemmy instance and look at the sysadmin.world community from it, and it looks different than lemmy.world. I just looked at https://reddthat.com/c/sysadmin@lemmy.world/ and there too it only shows 6 comments.
  Pick any community and any number of instances and look at the community from several instances, and I see differences. I thought federation would make the same content show everywhere that is federated.

Beehaw and lemmy.world are not federated together anymore due to... reasons... so things are funky between them two. If you are on lemmy.world and look at beehaw you will only see old posts/comments that the lemmy.world server saw before it got defederated. And vica versa if you are on beehaw. There was a post about it by the lemmy.world admins a couple weeks ago explaining it and it was surprisingly complicated.
I don't remember what happens if say lemmy.one has a post, a beehaw.org account comments on it, and you view it from lemmy.world. I think you would still see the beehaw comment? If not, it may explain why the comments are different for each.
- Wait this directly contradicts what I was told in my below post. I'm still seeing some (not all) new posts from Beehaw. I used /c/gaming@behaw.org as an example.
  https://lemmy.world/post/652870

No, you’ll get different content based on everything from flaky federation (software that isn’t perfect) to differences in moderation.
So, for moderation, let’s do an example. Bob has an account on Server A. He posts a comment on a community with his Server A account which is federated from Server B.
But Bob breaks the terms of service / moderation rules on Server B. Server B mods block his account and his comment is not visible there.
If Alice views the comments on the post on Server A, she’ll see Bob’s comment. On Server B, where Bob is blocked, Alice won’t see Bob’s comment.
On Mastodon, servers will sometimes connect to Relays which specialize in moving content between many different servers, which is different than moderation blocks ;)

26 comments