I’m still getting the hang of Lemmy and federated services.

I’m browsing the programming.dev instandce in the Liftoff app and I can choose to view:

  1. my subscribed communities on the server (currently none)
  2. Local communities on the server
  3. All (?)

I know All is not “all communities on Lemmy” but what perplexes me is I can see posts from another community that is hosted on a different server and it appears because it is “via programming.dev”.

At first I thought it was because a user registered on " programming.dev " posted on another instance but I opened my eyes and saw the user’s origin is no way related.

Any ideas?

EDIT:

After reading all the comments I’m pretty sure “via programming.dev” should read in the context of the post as !community@instance is known via programming.dev instance. I guess it makes it explicit which “all” I am browsing if I pick up browsing where I left off and forget I am not in the “all local”.

At this point I have only seen this on the Liftoff App for Lemmy but still trying other. Must be in the metadata and Liftoff decided to display it.

    • varsock@programming.devOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      gotcha. Forgive my ignorance but isn’t an instance federated with every other instance (using activityPub)? Or is communication != federation.

      I havent digested the docs but it appears the admins choose which instance they federate with? or how does this work.

      • Ategon@programming.dev
        8·
        1 year ago

        In addition to what was said in the other comment. If nobody in the instance has subscribed to a certain community it wont show up in the all sort as well. Its technically federated with it but its not pulling data since nobody is interested in said data

      • oessessnex@programming.dev
        3·
        1 year ago

        Every instance is federated with every other instance by default. However the admins can defederate from selected instances, which means the users cannot interact with that instance in any way.