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 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.
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.
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.
