If you query the lemmy API, you get a ton of fun JSON data:

One thing interesting that I saw was huge lists of other federated servers in the federated_instances dictionary.

There’s three arrays in there:

  1. linked
  2. allowed
  3. blocked

What do each of these mean, and what impact does it have on the server when they’re set to some list of hosts or if they’re null?

  • maltfieldOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    See also

    Regarding “federation state”: You can have a blocklist, then Lemmy will federate with every instance except blocked ones. Or have an allowlist, then it will only federate with the allowed ones. If neither is set then it also federate with everything. Using allowlist and blocklist together doesnt make much sense, then it would only federate with allowed instances which are not in the blocklist.

    …but this doesn’t address what linked does

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
      1·
      1 year ago

      Even with open federation an instance needs to know about other instances before they can actively push updates to them. This is what “linked” means.