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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Fediverse
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As already noted, on all of them.
The easy way to grasp how it works:
When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren't actually on community@instance.beta. You're actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That's the community you're reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.
The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it's actually a bunch of technically separate communities.
It's less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn't the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that's just the way it goes.
The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That's more or less what they've done. There's a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.
Also, all data isn't stored on every Lemmy I stance, only (or mostly I guess) where it is relevant.
As long as 1 person from an instance is subscribed to a community, that person's instance will fetch everything that happens inside that community (and keep storing it even if they later unsubscribe, unless manually purged by an instance admin)
So not everything everywhere but quite not that efficient ...
Thanks for the explanation.
Right, which on a side note is most of why I have accounts on a number of different instances and regularly switch between them - because each instance is at least subtly different, since they each have different userbases, and thus somewhat different sets of subscribed and thus federated communities.
But if you on instance.alpha subscribe to a community on instance.beta that would federate the community to your local instance, right? Is there something I'm missing?
Right, but of course if you don't subscribe to it (and nobody else does) then it doesn't.
So, for instance, if you go in through an account on a narrowly specialized instance, you're potentially not going to see a lot of the communities from other instances at all, even on their All, just because nobody's bothered to subscribe to them. And you'll likely see highly specialized communities that fit well with that instance that you might not see anywhere else.
The smaller the instance is, the more likely that is.
I have accounts on a couple of small instances on which I haven't even bothered to subscribe to anything, since their All already matches what I want frim the instsnce.
Yes, if you know about that community. However, by browsing the all feeds of multiple instances, you come across communities you weren’t aware of and can subscribe to on any of the instances you have an account on. Assuming, of course, they all federate.
that's possibly the best explanation of the difference between a corporate social or other media and a decentralised open source one.