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.
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.
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.
There’s already a Lemmy issue for that. Presumably one for Kbin too, though I’m not aware of it specifically at this point.
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
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.
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 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.
I am not an admin or a long time lemmy user. I have been here for like 3 weeks. If other people have better answers they are likely correct. Your post in this thread was asking why the communities don’t match and you didn’t mention anything about them being defederated. The point of my comment was to point out that that was likely why and give a quick summary of what I understood about it. I was just regurgitating what I understood from my reading on this issue. I am/was very possibly not 100% accurate, I was just hoping to point you in the right direction.
I am both commenting on this post and referencing the one you linked in your reply. But I think this is the meat and potatoes from the admins post that explains how it works. I also think by reading some other comments in that thread that the admins aren’t 100% correct maybe(?) Because it seems that we may be in a read only state, like, we still receive their content/comments, they just don’t get ours. There is a paragraph I bolded that somewhat explains the phenomenon you are talking about.
The gist of it is when you look at a post/community you are looking at a version hosted on your instance. We (lemmy.world) are scrubbed from existence on the beehaw.org hosted version of posts, but they aren’t scrubbed from our version.
How defederation works Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users? Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities? This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities? Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the “true” version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren’t getting updates from any other lemmy, as the “true” version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org? That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post
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:
Thanks!
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.
Thanks!
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.
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 ;)
