So far I’m finding that subscribing to communities doesn’t seem to be the same experience as actually being a participant on that Lemmy instance that we’re Federated with. Notably, the upvotes don’t seem to sync properly to our instance which makes communities feel dead when they have hundreds or thousands of users on other instances. Also, it feels like a lot of the posts and/or comments from other instances don’t actually show up when I subscribe to those communities from our instance.
Can anybody else share their experience? Is this just an issue with our particular instance? Or a bug with synchronization across instances? Or does it just take a long time for things to catch up?
Also, the sorting is horrible. Sorting by “Active” sometimes shows me posts from over a year ago, and sorting by “Hot” seems to have similar issues. The only way of seeing newer content at the moment seems to be sorting by “New”.
Hopefully a lot of these issues are resolved over time but right now it definitely feels a bit rough around the edges.
I’m going to look into this more. My limited understanding is that, basically, our server can’t see anything that someone on another server does unless we federate with that server. The way we do this is to join communities on other servers.
However, this also means that if, say, you are from server A, you are on a community on server B, and someone else is from server C, and both you and the person from server C post to that community, you can’t see each others posts or upvotes or whatever unless server A and server C are federated (as described above). That seems a major flaw in this entire thing, TBH.
I wonder if @djundjila@sub.wetshaving.social or @Mayana@sub.wetshaving.social have other thoughts on this.
Related question, if we were to federate with other communities, would we have some basic guidelines governing which communities we federate with?
We federate with any server who our members choose to join their communities, or who join our communities. I reserve the right to ban communities that are known abusers. @Mayana@sub.wetshaving.social has a lot of federation admining experience and has been passing information about abusive subLemmys along to me.
Perfect! Exactly what I expected and hoped.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of that, but I feel it shouldn’t work that way. I would think that the instance that actually owns the community that other instances are subscribed to would centralize all the data and distribute it to all the servers it is federated with.
I agree, it’s really an imperfect way of doing it.