Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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founded 1 year ago

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From a networking perspective, does the Fediverse strike anyone else as "optimistic"? (endlesstalk.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it's from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe it would have to do so with local data.

To illustrate with some possibly-new-to-you examples:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

What's your experience like clicking these? Does it go through first time?
I realize they'll be people for whom these work first time no problem, and they'll wonder what I'm complaining about. I'm not really complaining about anything really, I'm just wondering if my instinctive reaction has any validity.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

were empty, and
had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You got it.

This is a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol so similar kinds of behaviour / problems shows up in mastodon, etc as well. Until someone subscribes, it doesn't exist locally and posts don't start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

So does this mean that if I'm browsing "All" I'm not actually seeing "All" but "All from the communities/instances members of my instance subscribe to"?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That explains a lot, then. When I was on Vlemmy before it was deleted "All" seemed a lot more populated, now I moved to a smaller instance and it seems a lot more repetitive.

It's a shame it works that way since everyone says the "ideal" is a ton of small instances rather than big ones.

Thanks for the clarification!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yup. You need to use a third party service like https://lemmyverse.net/communities and then subscribe.

There's no reason why this functionality can't be built into lemmy/kbin in future. It's on the feature wishlist for the lemmy/kbin clone that I'm building.