I’m learning about the Fediverse and am confused about how federation is supposed to work. I understand that there can be communities with the same name in different instances, with different content. But I also understand you can subscribe to another instance’s community. For example, there are sysadmin commnunities at lemmy.world, lemmy.one, and beehaw.org (among others). If we focus on one specific community, let’s say [email protected], we can find that community from any of the instances. If I go to each instance and look at [email protected] from each one, I can see the same pinned post is at the top of each one instance’s view (“Calling all /r/sysadmin reddit refugees!” by DarraignTheSane).
Great!
However, if I look at that pinned thread from each of the three instances, the comment stream is different. The post itself is the same, but the comment thread is a mixed bag. Some comments seem to appear in multiple instances while others only in one or two, but never all three
lemmy.world shows 11 comments lemmy.one shows 6 comments beehaw.org shows 4 comments
On lemmy.world, the second newest comment says “Nice! It feels like home.” This comment also shows up on lemmy.one however not on beehaw
The newest comment on lemmy.world says “yeeey” but doesn’t appear in any other instance’s view of [email protected]
This is just one specific example. Are you not supposed to get the same content, when looking at the same community, regardless of what instance you are logged into when viewing it? Or am I missing something?
Wait this directly contradicts what I was told in my below post. I’m still seeing some (not all) new posts from Beehaw. I used /c/[email protected] as an example.
https://lemmy.world/post/652870
I am not an admin or a long time lemmy user. I have been here for like 3 weeks. If other people have better answers they are likely correct. Your post in this thread was asking why the communities don’t match and you didn’t mention anything about them being defederated. The point of my comment was to point out that that was likely why and give a quick summary of what I understood about it. I was just regurgitating what I understood from my reading on this issue. I am/was very possibly not 100% accurate, I was just hoping to point you in the right direction.
I am both commenting on this post and referencing the one you linked in your reply. But I think this is the meat and potatoes from the admins post that explains how it works. I also think by reading some other comments in that thread that the admins aren’t 100% correct maybe(?) Because it seems that we may be in a read only state, like, we still receive their content/comments, they just don’t get ours. There is a paragraph I bolded that somewhat explains the phenomenon you are talking about.
Another one I bolded explains you can still see posts on beehaw communities, but they are from lemmy.world users? Maybe double check you aren’t seeing lemmy.world users posts in those communities?
The gist of it is when you look at a post/community you are looking at a version hosted on your instance. We (lemmy.world) are scrubbed from existence on the beehaw.org hosted version of posts, but they aren’t scrubbed from our version.
Thanks. Yes, it does appear we are in read only. I guess I’ll just simplify this and not subscibe to any beehaw communities.