I recently migrated or better yet am still in the process of migrating from feddit.de to dataterm.digital. I really like it here and probably will stay here but I’ve been wondering about the difference in the “all” feed when comparing the 2 instances. On feddit.de’s “all” feed I see many more new posts than on dataterm.digital’s “all” feed. (I’m comparing sorted by new)

Can someone explain to me why that is and what’s happening there? Shouldn’t I be seeing the same posts regardless of the instances, given the instance isn’t defederated?

  • pionaiki@dataterm.digital
    6·
    2 years ago

    Every instance has a list of instances that it is federated with (that the server sees). Feddit.de is a bigger instance than dataterm.digital, it has more users, which means that it is federated with more instances. It doesn’t mean that you can’t view the instances from here. You can paste the [email protected] to the dataterm searchbar and if this community wasn’t on the federated list it now will be. That’s why more users = more posts on the All feed.

    • Tywele@dataterm.digitalOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      So you are saying I can only see posts of communities in the all feed that have been indexed by this instance? (Meaning it has been searched for in the search bar)

      • megahbite@dataterm.digitalEnglish
        7·
        2 years ago

        Yes, federation isn’t a passive thing that the instance does. Think of it as us living on an island and striking forth as explorers to make new trade routes with other lands. We can only know about those other lands if one of our explorers has sought them out.

          • megahbite@dataterm.digitalEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            The fediverse is deliberately designed not to do that as federation is not cheap in terms of computing resources. I believe it’s exponentially complex as the number of federated instances grows, at least that’s my understanding with Mastodon.

            • pionaiki@dataterm.digitalEnglish
              4·
              2 years ago

              There exist ActivityPub relays that are basically already filled indexes that you can connect to a Mastodon instance. This is what it says in the admin settings:

              A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers.