Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
Defederating lemmy.world is a temporary measure as better mod tools are made. It isn’t worth handwringing over. Defederation should not be the norm for dealing with a few trolls, or objectionable communities.
This isn’t handwringing, though I can understand why it might come off that way. This is simply mulling over how things “actually work” in the fediverse as opposed to how people believe it works. I believe that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is and how it works. This is an educational issue that we have an opportunity to begin sorting out
In addition, my scenario of instance users subscribing to illegal content will still be valid even with moderation tools. The only way to stop that currently is defederation with instances hosting illegal content.
Federation/Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community. Gated communities shouldn’t be the expected norm. So, I would agree with the lemmy.world people who are upset at being broadly blocked from a Fediverse community. But it doesn’t matter because beehaw says it is temporary.
This is true, except for one element:
Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.
A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It’s less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to “join an instance that aligns with your preferences” for this reason.
Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.
Trust me, there’s likely more gating present than you’re aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won’t mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.
A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there’s some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist
I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.
While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across “the network”, where “the network” is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.
Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers
You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you’re essentially mirroring their content
Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.
I don’t think that assertion is based in reality. A server has to be hosted somewhere, and admins will generally choose to uphold those local regulations for the sake of their instance’s own longevity. Federation has never meant that you communicate with literally every other instance. This isn’t Tor where nodes pass along communications that don’t directly involve themselves.
Two separate issues are prompting “defederation”. Blocking users from posting to your local community and blocking remote communities from being mirrored on your server. Those should be handled differently. Beehaw didn’t want trolls posting mean things and blocked every user on a server. Your concern about illegal content would be more a complaint about specific communities that feature that content.
Either way you shouldn’t blame an entire server for a few users or communities you don’t want. Expecting everyone on a instance to be like minded isn’t going to work.
The only way to not address things on a per-server basis is for moderation tools to be expanded in scope. Maybe that will be how things work one day, but it is not how things can work right now.
Completely understandable. I am not opposed to moderation or keeping people safe from harassment.
If that’s the only way to stop harassment, yes, you do… anyone on that instance that isn’t like-minded with the behavior that instance permits is well-advised to leave it for one better suited to their own beliefs.
It’s a stopgap measure until better moderating tools are developed. I can’t blame them for it.
By that line of reasoning all alt-right, homophobe, harassing, doxxing, trolling etc. instances should be allowed to access every other instance to spread their hate. Is that really what you want? I don’t.
Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.
Because entire instances have already devolved to that and thus been blocked by the wider fediverse.
yeah this is like everything on our defederation list besides lemmygrad, shitjustworks, and lemmyworld–we’re literally using a block list which is dedicated to those kinds of instances
Is there a central place to track these instances?. Or do you all have a text list or the reasons you defederated some that you may be open to sharing (even privately). I was looking for something specifically to avoid things like illegal content and the like.
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On some level I think you’re both right - this is roughly the problem that happened with email and spam.
At one point it was trivial to run your own Mailserver, this got harder and harder as issues with spam got worse. Places started black holing servers they didn’t know and trust, this drove ever more centralization and a need for server level monitoring/moderation because a few bad actors could get a whole server blocked.
We can know that bad actors will exist, both at the user and at the server level. We can also know that this has a history of driving centralization. All of this should be kept in mind as the community discusses and designs moderation tools.
Ideally, I hope we can settle on systems and norms that allow small leaf nodes to exist and interconnect while also keeping out bad actors.
Some are run or overrun by those kind of people. Have a look at how many instances are already defederated: https://beehaw.org/instances
We sure, I can understand Defederation from “skinheads.social”. I’m more concerned with large instances like lemmy.world who just are rather wide-open. I wonder if large open instances are just bad.
The Admins here have been pretty open about the fact that they’re keen on re-federating with large instances once better moderation tools are available!
There totally are fascist instances though, and I think defederating from those is cool and good. I’m not thrilled about the beehaw defederation either, but I respect the mods’ decision, especially since it’s targeted only at the two instances with users who were actually causing problems and I can still access beehaw communities from my non lemmy.world accounts
My understanding is that people from Lenny.world can still “use” behaw by subscribing to communities and commenting on posts, but people on Behaw just can’t see them. Is that not how it works?
I have to say I chose behaw because I wanted a more heavily modded experience here. I really don’t mind them shadow banning whole communities if a disproportionate number of trolls are coming over from them. People have got the right to speak, not the right to be heard. The internet’s full of kids just wanting to be obnoxious, and I’ve got to say I’m more then happy that other humans are helping me to filter that junk out
Unfortunately, defederating means the cord has been cut. This means we still have what was previously been posted, but all future content is bidirectionally blocked.
This doesn’t mean it cant be mended.
When a Lemmy.World user posts to a Beehaw community right now, it updates the cached community that Lemmy.World stores. Beehaw has defederated with them, so the “source of truth” (hosted by Beehaw) never updates. The source of truth is what updates other federated instances. As a result, someone on startrek.website, for example, will not see posts made by lemmy.world users to beehaw communities. The only people who can see what lemmy.world users post to beehaw right now are other lemmy.world users.
Won’t that cause a major problem if/when Beehaw would want to refederate, and all that pent up stuff just pours on Beehaw all at once?
When/if refederation happens, the comments lost to the abyss will stay lost to the abyss. The source of truth will not update based on the past updates of a formerly defederated instance to my understanding
As far as I understand it (though it may be incorrect) - they won’t be synchronized. Content between instances is synced/cached only when the instances are federated, and it doesn’t go backwards - only posts after federation will be visible.
Just because this software can be used that way, doesn’t mean you’re required to use it that way.
If I want to start a lemmy server and not let lemmy.world in, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Lemmy.world isn’t owed anything, they’re not owed to view content in my community, they’re not owed that I show their content to my users. And if my users are unhappy with that, that’s fine, it’s their choice to stay in my enclosed community or not.
Just because we’re running the same software and the same communication protocols doesn’t change that.
@Cipher I think of it more of an instructional issue specifically rather than learning issue. People explain “it’s like email” but fail to deliver the fact that it should be more like “It’s how the internet should work”. Where people think Lemmy is THE SITE and can communicate with kbin THE SITE.
It should be mentioned that if anyone has built a website, that Lemmy is the software. You install Google Chrome on your computer, you install lemmy on your computer. You are now able to ACCESS all the other websites like you would in Chrome.
People think “oh it’s like email, well I know Gmail is pretty good so I’ll make an account there. Whatever decisions Google makes is by extension my decision.” The average user doesn’t know what email actually is. They don’t know that you can make your own email service. They don’t know you can even just buy a domain and have your own email address.
The only thing that bugs me about the fediverse as a whole is that these threadiverse concepts shouldn’t have communities. If it was implemented as intended, you’d have to make a community by making a new instance. The community should be federated, and then duplicate communities would get individually federated or defederated.
I think the ambiguity of the fediverse is muddied by how each software is trying to implement it. And it’s almost hard to incentivize making your own instance.
People think "oh it’s like email, well I know Gmail is pretty good so I’ll make an account there. Whatever decisions Google makes is by extension my decision
This is why I think email analogy is very useful to get the basics of how Lemmy/kbin work on a technical level but falls flat on a practical and social level
You have what I would call federation idealists that feel that is should be just like email you should be able to contact anyone. This ignores the fact that email is private communication tool vs a public facing forum.
The argument that instances should be utilities with no “politics” or “culture” just ignores the reality.
The problem with the idea that each community should be its own instance basically comes down to cost, both financial and time. If I want to make a community about something I’m passionate about I’d have to shell out money I don’t have on hosting, buy a domain, learn how to actually host and administrate a Lemmy instance, and then spend like half of my time and energy maintaining it.
Not everyone is a programmer with programmer knowledge making programmer money.
Exactly, at the start of the growth phase for new sites, people want things to look stable. Seeing drama from Z site because Y site disconnected from them can look pretty unappealing
People don’t dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it’s a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It’s a flawed system. I don’t know what a good solution would be, but it’s definitely an issue.
I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.
I’m torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn’t super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what’s going on.
I think Beehaw’s decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They’ve already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.
Yep. I have accounts on three instances, but I had been using my Lemmy.World one the most, and then suddenly my beehaw communities are gone. It’s not a huge deal given that these accounts are so young, but it was still annoying. These sorts of things will prevent Lemmy from growing as an overall community.
I think you’ll find a lot of people disagree that this is how it should work.
It’s not my intent to determine how things “should” work.
This is how things DO currently work.
If lemmy.world could read this they’d be very upset
It makes perfect sense to me. You’re allowed to do with your own server what you want. That’s one of the advantages of foss.
There have always been private communities. Just because these ones are running on standardized protocols that allow communication between servers, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly required to be public and let everything in.
It’s more about being public and after getting traction going private. Being private from the start is a completely different thing.
Not that I think beehaw does that, they were clear it’s temporary because of a lack of proper modding/admin tools.
The other option is to completely ignore federation, and just create an account on every instance because that’s the only way to not lose the communities there.
There exists no means to be private without defederating from literally every other instance.
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The intent of Beehaw appears to be giving people a safe place that they can return to, but they can venture out just as well. That ideal does not mesh with an allowlist. The goal doesn’t appear to be to curate a specific experience, it is to block bad actors from harassing Beehaw’s users on Beehaw’s hosted communities.
With this in mind, I think it absolutely does make sense for lemmy to include permissions that restrict what foreign users can do vs what local users can
I was explaining how private works, but I guess I misunderstood what you were saying they’re.
What you are saying here runs counter to what the beehaw admins say. Do you really know more about their plans than what they said?
We’re open by default because we have the belief that you have a right to demonstrate you can be a good actor. @Gaywallet@beehaw.org details this in the philosophy of our community.
Trust me when I say defederation was the last choice on the radar for this situation.
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We’re open by default because we have the belief that you have a right to demonstrate you can be a good actor. @Gaywallet@beehaw.org details this in the philosophy of our community.
Trust me when I say defederation was the last choice on the radar for this situation.
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The tools are lacking, as you said.
This post is not about how things should be. It’s not about how things might be one day. It’s about how they are right now
Maybe the lemmy software doesn’t offer that as a feature right now, but from what I undertstand it’s not an issue on protocol level. So it’s mostly a lack of user friendly configuration options?
Broadly speaking, that’s correct.
Regardless of how development goes in the future, this post is meant to highlight the realities of the current, and the ideological realities of what content on the fediverse is, as well as where you are served it from.
It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞
If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).
From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.
Signing up for social networking so you can start yanking tech support and reading man pages right away? Is this some elaborate masochistic exploration that we don’t know about? What the vuck are you all talking about…
People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.
As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.
I’m reading this on kbin(new transplant from an old Reddit account) and I have little idea what this is about lol
Here’s an analogy, hope it helps:
Kbin.social and beehaw.org are like really advanced email servers (e.g. outlook.com, gmail.com)
The content you’re seeing on kbin is like viewing an email sent from another server, in the case of this thread you’re getting content from beehaw.org.
These aren’t just normal emails, they’re super advanced emails with comments, replies, categories, votes etc.
The content is downloaded to the kbin servers for your viewing pleasure, and you can send an ‘email’ back to beehaw by engaging in their posts/communities like you’re doing now. That will send what you’ve done back to beehaw so it’s all synced up for their users.If beehaw ever goes down/gets unlinked from kbin you’ll still have the old ‘emails’ (content) but you won’t be able to engage with them anymore. Like if someone deleted their email account it doesn’t delete all the emails they sent to other people.
Sure, and I should’ve been more clear and said people need to understand what the Fediverse is.
This is, ultimately, about what federation means and how this platform operates. Its deficiencies, and the way things work currently to address those deficiencies. What I have posted is just as true for kbin as it is for lemmy.
Personally, with a background in software/programming, but little to no knowledge about how ActivityPub and the interactions between federated instances work, I really appreciate this post and the discussions. Learned a lot today!
Thanks, I really appreciate that. Education was the foremost goal of this post, and I’m glad some of that may have come through
People also need to be mindful that the concept of the fediverse isn’t a simple one, not to the majority of people who use Reddit / other sites. We want to try and streamline the process of searching for, signing up to and contributing to content, at least if we want these platforms to continue to grow.
We don’t need the 400+ million that Reddit has but having more interested users will help generate more content / engagement
If communities belonged to “lemmy” you would have Reddit. If anything would be forcefully federated it would be a mess. IMHO it’s the right balance. I get your concerns about being confusing but given the state of development of the platform most of it will be solved by a better UI and better instance data synchronization policies, etc…
I agree. These mechanisms are in place to stop the fediverse from becoming fedChan
I think it would be more like reddit if there was a single super Lemmy instance, the extra layer of self hosting confuses everyone
For example, lemmy.world are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities.
Are they, though? I’ve read a lot about it, and everyone over there seems to more or less understand it, kind of just shrug about it now, and have moved on. Lemmy world sees it’s bigger than beehaw now, has tons of its own content, still has access everywhere else and will be fine.
I have absolutely seen some highly upvoted pillars of salt over there.
To me the whole situation is a “they bit off more than they could chew” kind of thing so you pull the nuclear option… Honestly I’m avoiding subscribing to any beehaw communities because I won’t be able to see any posts made from one of the most populous instances, hence diminishing their value. As a general user I would avoid signing up for beehaw as well for the same reasons.
bit off more than they could chew
By starting a Lemmy instance a year and a half before Rexxit? I never saw them claim to want to be the next Reddit. The Fediverse had an influx of users and Lemmy doesn’t currently have the mod or admin tools to deal with that situation gracefully. My understanding is that most of the bad actors were external to Beehaw.
They didn’t bite off anything, shit was being shoved into their mouth so they closed it.
Personally, I’m using my very own Lemmy instance so that I can choose who I federate with (including Beehaw). I totally understand why some folks might want to have their home instance elsewhere, and it’s cool that federation gives us that ability.
By starting a Lemmy instance a year and a half before Rexxit?
By not being prepared for it. It was setup with default communities, like technology for example (correct me if I’m wrong), but no plan to deal with those with moderation capabilities and levels that reach their own standard. To me it’s only making the entire experience untrustworthy and stunted. Somehow lemmy.world and others can deal with it without defederating others so that’s where I’ll go.
By not being prepared for it. It was setup with default communities, like technology for example (correct me if I’m wrong), but no plan to deal with those with moderation capabilities and levels that reach their own standard.
i mean… yeah? it’s not every day you suddenly have 5x the number of total users on your site visiting the site per minute because a major corporation just did something extremely unpopular with no forewarning. if we had that kind of clairvoyance, i’d be a millionaire and running this site would just be my full-time job. this strikes me as an irrational critique informed by the hindsight you have now, weeks after it began.
Somehow lemmy.world and others can deal with it without defederating others so that’s where I’ll go.
this is primarily because they have more permissive rules and no defined ethos they’re trying to upkeep—or at least, they don’t have the latter in a way that requires constant maintenance. (as a point of note last i checked, lemmy.world didn’t even have listed rules, per se,[1] so it’d be hard to parse what’s even not allowed as a user besides “actively illegal content”) we, by contrast, have a very clear idea of what we want—we spent a year thinking about it, and we’re at a year and a half of making it reality—so defederation in the absence of better mod tools is an extremely obvious way to maintain that. actually it’s the only tool we have in a lot of cases, which is a gripe we have with Lemmy that we’re trying to solve
although Ruud has told us he’ll moderate hate speech, bigotry, etc. from the top, so implicitly those aren’t supposed to be allowed. i question how viable doing this is with such an open-registration policy, more-or-less unvetted mods, and lots of communities to keep track of but i suppose all instances here can be thought of as large-scale experiments right now ↩︎
Every time I start a new project my first thought is obviously “how would this scale to hundreds of thousands of people?” (I tried breadmaking over the pandemic help)
A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them.
The thing that I think didn’t sit right with a lot of people is that Beehaw’s admins apparently said (I haven’t seen it first hand) that they see a future in refederating with Beehaw’s communities being kept private, only accessible to Beehaw users, while Beehaw users would get access to the wider Fediverse.
To be honest, I feel that it’s Beehaw’s prerogative to grant or revoke access to anyone on other instances, but also I wouldn’t be surprised that in turn other instances would not federate with an instance that would not give access to other instances’ users for its communities.
That’s sounds…not possible. At least at the current iteration of the software. It also seems like kinda the opposite of what the fediverse was meant to be.
I just looked at one of my communities and the only main setting is whether mods can post. You can’t set perms at the community level to exclude certain users or make them private
Yep, not possible currently, hence defederation for now. The point is that there must be some change, better mod tools, less new users, or something to change the calculus for Beehaw to refederate. The point Beehaw is making that they can’t create the community they want with the current software iteration, either with regards to perms or mod tools without defederating from other big instances.
BTW that’s my point, it’s not what the Fediverse is meant to be, that’s why it’s weird. Again, this is second hand info, so take it with a grain of salt.
We are swiftly hitting a point where there will need to be instances just to manage user registrations and avoid bottlenecks and scaling issues.
IDK why is everyone making accounts on the 3-4 biggest instances.
IDK why is everyone making accounts on the 3-4 biggest instances.
How do you expect a newcomer who has no understanding of content federation to find these low-pop instances? Of course everyone’s joining the main handful, they don’t know anything else exists.
I’d imagine most people coming from typical social media don’t even realize that instances are a thing when they sign up on one. They’ve heard about lemmy or kbin or whatever, so they go to lemmy or kbin or whatever and sign up. Once they learn how it works, they’ve already established a profile on that instance; they’re not going to start over on a new one.
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Many ActivityPub services allow you to seamlessly transfer your profile from one instance to another. It even sends messages that let your followers update so they follow you at your new address. Moving profiles isn’t a big deal. It’s Ok if they join a big instance at first, and move later.
But do people know that? Not a rhetorical question, I only have direct experience with kbin and only a week’s worth at that. I had only the very foggiest idea what all of this was when I came to kbin and signed up. I’ve learned a lot more since then, but I’m still brand new to this.
If I have no complaints with kbin, why would I be motivated to look for a new instance? Should I be looking anyway? What compelling reasons exist to shop around, as it were?
There are compelling reasons why new folks join big instances and it’s not definitely a bad thing
Seems like the natural progression of this sort of thing, no? Has enough time even passed to tell if this is a problem or not? This is a bit of an aside, but I feel like there’s been a lot of doomposting the last few days about imagined future problems. Have we really had enough time to make any actionable observations?
Smaller pop instance admins such as myself could do a better job at advertising we are open for new people to register. It definitely feels weird for me to go out and advertise my instance though (since you know I would have to post on other instance’s communities for it to be seen)
It’d be cool if we had a dedicated place we could drop a post mentioning our servers so people could see. Advertising new instances won’t be a problem for now, but I could see it being an issue once bad actors get bots set up here.
This wasn’t the impression I got from the Beehaw admins. I believe they felt that blocking lemmy.world users from Beehaw but still being able to have Beehaw users interact with lemmy.world would have been better than full defederation, but I don’t think that was the ideal solution either. Something like an approval process for an external user to interact with Beehaw communities would be preferable.
Also, Beehaw could go fully private today if they wanted to, that definitely doesn’t seem to be their intention.
I do, personally, think it’s reasonable for an instance to have “private” communities exclusive to their own users. This is likely a subject that comes down to personal belief, but after dealing with so many trolls and bad actors on other platforms, I absolutely do see a need to have those kinds of permissions.
Instances hold copies of other instances’ communities? I thought it was simply an API call to the other server. Not an expert, tho.
That is correct, and this is why a new instances only shows the most recent 20 posts for a community until someone from the viewing instance subscribes to it. From that moment forward (barring de-federation), the host instance sends updates to the viewing instance. The viewing instance provides content to its users from the local copy that it stores.
Yep, on regular intervals your instance asks for the latest data from the remote community and that’s what it serves to its users. So it doesn’t matter if 1 person or 100 are subbed on asingle remote, it’s the same number of calls.
Is there a reason for working like this and not simply be a portal to the other instance’s community?
I’m not a lemmy dev but my understanding is that doing it that way would end up exponentially increasing latency once you start getting nested links to communities - accessing a post on lemmy.world that was linked to lemmy.nz and then finally read through a beehaw account, for example, might have to jump through at three servers on opposite sides of the world before getting to me rather than just being served directly across the pacific from beehaw’s server to me!
Probably for reliability and stability — otherwise, every view from every federated instance would create a new request to the hosting instance. The protocol itself would basically DDoS smaller instances. Also you can still read the cached version on your home instance if the remote instance is temporarily down.
This is so cool, these discussions remind me of events in the Bobiverse books where the spirit of these topics are similar. Also the start trek instance is totally getting this right from my perspective of things (startrek.website). Of course there are many ways to approach this as « right » is one’s opinion.
