Hello! I hope this community is the right place to post this. I just had a quick question about federation; I’m trying to set up my account and follow some larger communities like those on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org. When I subscribe to one of those communities from Dataterm, is the entirety of that instance (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org) then federated with this instance? Or just the specific community (e.g., /c/gaming, /c/technology, etc)?
Also, how come some posts have different upvotes or comments depending on the instance theyr’re viewed from? For example, this post: Dataterm Version, lemmy.ml version has a huge disparity.
definitely a good place to ask this!
My linited understandign based on Lemmys docs (https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_getting_started.html) is that only the community you subscribe to will federate:
If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:
- New posts, comments
- Votes
- …
That should explain the missing content as well: Lemmy only fetches a portion of a community at the time of subscribing, and only the content created after the initial federation will be sent to us - you can manually force a refresh by getting the link to a comment on the remote instance, and searching that on our instance - that’ll get all the data about its parents, but that’s admittedly pretty inconvenient. The process is described in more detail in the docs linked above!
