Let’s say we have lemmy instances A, B, C.

alice from A makes a post “Hello, world” to B. What happens? How is it processed on servers A, B, C and how do users from A, B, C receive her post?

  • @Zak
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    26 days ago

    instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content

    That’s not quite true. They don’t do it automatically or routinely, but a user can cause a server to read a post from another server by putting its URL into the search box. This can be useful for an end user to manually address a federation glitch.

    Here’s a concrete example. I was trying to post a comment via lemmy.world, but lemmy.world sits behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare flagged its content as potentially malicious. I then posted that comment via my own Mastodon server, but push federation to lemmy.world also failed, for the same reason. I could, however cause lemmy.world to pull the comment using the search.