I’ve been on Lemmy for some time now and it’s time for me to finally understand how Federation works. I have general idea and I have accounts on three federated instances, but I need some details.

Let Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta be four federated instances. I have an account on Alpha and create a post in a community on Beta. A persoson from Gamma comments on it and a person from Delta upvotes the post and the comment.

The question: On which instances are the post, the comment and the upvotes stored?

    • Rottcodd@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      44
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s less efficient than a centralized forum would be, but efficiency isn’t the only or even the highest priority. Decentralization is the explicit point of the fediverse, and to the degree that that requires sacrificing some measure of efficiency, that’s just the way it goes.

      The goal was to build a system that would be robust and relatively seamless while remaining decentralized. That’s more or less what they’ve done. There’s a fair amount of fine tuning and tweaking left to be done, and actively being done, but the basic system is what it is because it best balances all of the goals.

      • MrSilkworm@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        that’s possibly the best explanation of the difference between a corporate social or other media and a decentralised open source one.

    • Falmarri@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      It depends what you mean by inefficient. It’s very efficient if you’re optimizing for robustness and control of data.

      • Corgana@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s also very efficient if you’re optimizing for having an actual fucking conversation without algorithms or ads.

      • lemmyingly@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Control or redundancy of data?

        If there is a federated delete, I get the impression there is no actual way to ensure that data is deleted?