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?
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 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
High volumes of posts, low server bandwidth, or an instance with too few worker processes can just slow down the syncing process.
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.
Ah it didn’t occur to me that mods at various instances may be removing individual comments. Can an instance moderate the individual thread comments of a community from another instance? I was thinking that federating with another instance meant all that instance’s threads and comments would be available to your users in turn. If that’s not the case, then the only way for a user to be sure to get all of a community’s content is view it from that community’s home server
I agree. Unfortunately this is a do or die problem I think. Either they find a way to bring these communities together or the fediverse remains fractured and will never pick up steam. I’m over reddit, but I long term there’s no way I’m checking 5 identically named communities from 5 different points of view to try to put comment chains together…
You’re talking about different issues I think. What OP mentioned is inconsistency with one community being seen across different instances.
Right, so if I can see A and C from my vantage, but from A I can see ABC, and from C I can see ACD, then I have to view the same chain of replies from several different vantage points to get the whole conversation.
The inconsistency is that you can’t see ABCD in a comment chain from every vantage point.
Imagine if Discord was like that… it’d have folded a day after it released lol.
I think the solution is for federation to be bilateral. If A defederates from B then A cannot see a B article and B cannot see an A article. No more fragmented comments, all comments are sent to the server the post was made on, and read from there as well. This half-copy sometimes-delayed fragmentation is just insanity even at this small of a scale, and I don’t see a way to scale it without the house of cards falling.
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
There are two things in play here. One is that beehaw has lemmy.world defederated due to high moderation volume, so that connection is broken. This is part of how federation works and is to some extent inevitable. Because it’s splitting community userbases, however, I do think that defederation decisions can be more fraught on lemmy than they are on Mastodon in some ways. The only solutions here are, either the moderation load is reduced to the point beehaw refederates, or moderation tools improve to make it easier for them to manage the load, or you migrate to an instance that isn’t defederated.
I do think it strongly incentivizes mainstream community creators to set up shop on instances that are both large and well-moderated, to make it the most likely that the most users will be able to access that community. (Because other instances won’t want to defederate.)
The other thing is that some servers that are federated still have issues with comments getting lost. This is a technical issue that is supposed to be improved with the new version of Lemmy. How I see it manifest on blahaj is that with some of the busier servers, especially lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, some comments never make it over to blahaj.
There is a workaround, sort of, which is that if I search for a specific comment by URL, that alerts blahaj to its existence, and then it appears. But I have to know the comment exists and care enough to go the trouble.
We need a lemmy client that has the option to “merge” communities of different instances on the app level.
There’s already a Lemmy issue for that. Presumably one for Kbin too, though I’m not aware of it specifically at this point.
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.
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