This is something I wondered about the federated microblogging platforms that I never got a clear answer about. It’s less relevant to Lemmy as federation here is broken down by community and not the entire instance, unlike the microblogging sites. If I have a Mastodon instance named myinstance.com and I follow someone or interact with a post on remoteinstance.com, according to the documentation, our instances have “discovered” each other. myinstance.com will fetch all posts from remoteinstance.com from that point onwards and display them in the federated timeline. But does this mean that the users on remoteinstance.com will also fetch posts from myinstance.com if no user on remoteinstance.com has interacted with myinstance.com before?

  • @Klaymore@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    21 year ago

    It only federates a community if a user on the other server subscribes to the community. So if you subscribe to a community on remoteinstance.com, then all posts and everything from that community will be federated over to your server, but no other communities will be, and posts on your server won’t be automatically federated to them.