I’m trying to understand more about how lemmy works, would you mind explaining what a community feeder is? (And, unrelated, if you have spare time, what federation actually means… is it a two way street or only one way?)
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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As well, this image explains it well.
By default new communities don't federate in automatically, they have to be pulled manually by a user. Or in the case of the community seeder bot, it uses javascript to jerry rig a bot that pulls the top communities across a bunch of the top the instances. Community discovery by default in lemmy is kinda hot garbage right now. I am hopeful for it to improve though.
https://fediprimer.org/ is a good site that explains in detail about federation
Thanks, that’s useful! So when you talk about defederating, that would break the connection between the two instances? So you are not in contact anymore and neither can pull info from the other?
Hm, kind of but not entirely depending on whatever way the wind blows? It's weird. At baseline it should do that, and most of the time it does. But if the defederations aren't mutual you sometimes end up with comments being pulled from defederated instances but never federating back to the commenters home instance so they never see it. It's a very bad means of functioning and has some nasty potential for harassment, but is an embedded issue within the protocol lemmy relies rather than lemmy itself. That is why many instances do mutual block across the fediverse.
Thanks a lot for the explanation!