Every instance has a list of instances that it is federated with (that the server sees). Feddit.de is a bigger instance than dataterm.digital, it has more users, which means that it is federated with more instances. It doesn't mean that you can't view the instances from here. You can paste the !community@instance.tld to the dataterm searchbar and if this community wasn't on the federated list it now will be. That's why more users = more posts on the All feed.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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So you are saying I can only see posts of communities in the all feed that have been indexed by this instance? (Meaning it has been searched for in the search bar)
Yes, federation isn’t a passive thing that the instance does. Think of it as us living on an island and striking forth as explorers to make new trade routes with other lands. We can only know about those other lands if one of our explorers has sought them out.
I wonder if one could somehow automate this. 🤔
The fediverse is deliberately designed not to do that as federation is not cheap in terms of computing resources. I believe it’s exponentially complex as the number of federated instances grows, at least that’s my understanding with Mastodon.
There exist ActivityPub relays that are basically already filled indexes that you can connect to a Mastodon instance. This is what it says in the admin settings:
A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers.
It would be nice to get something like this for lemmy
I don't think we would use it on dataterm.digital. We don't on corteximplant.com
Why not?
So I personally would be against it because rn the 'All' feed on Dataterm and the 'Federated' feed on CORTEX are our users' eye into the internet. It's what our users want to see collectively. If we used a relay we would see everything instead. I don't know how the other mods/admins feel about it but I'm guessing similarly. Also, the point of the federation is that you the user are the algorithm in a way, and using a relay would kind of break that imo.
Yes
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