So let’s say I’m interested in posting on both tng.lemmy.com and on ds9.lemmy.com, but the two servers have declared themselves fandom blood enemies, and they refuse to federate with one another. Is the @flelk@tng.lemmy.com account totally unable to see posts on the ds9.lemmy.com domain?
(If this isn’t appropriate to post here, please feel free to direct me somewhere else. I’m just trying to understand how this thing works, don’t want to take the community off-topic.)
AFAIK if both federate with a 3rd server, you might end up seeing some comments from the other server if you subscribe to a community on the 3rd server. Edit: This is actually not how it works right now, but rather how it is proposed to work in the future.
If they have each other blocklisted, then everything from the other instance will be blocked. Same if they use allowlists, and havent allowed each other. Relevant issue foe the last point.
So the instance where I create my account limits which other instances I can see? If my account is @user@alpha.com, and @alpha.com blocks @beta.com, I can’t see any communities from @beta.com, even if I choose to subscribe to them?
Correct. If thats a problem you should pick another instance (or create your own).
Interesting. I don’t love the idea of my “home” instance dictating what I can choose to see, but I understand why the architecture is structured that way. It’s sounding increasingly as though if I want full visibility into the Lemmy-verse, the best way to use Lemmy is via a client on my own local machine, connecting directly to the instances I want to see.
Is that being contemplated? It sounds like I could create my own instance and federate with whoever I like, but is there a way to accomplish the same goal without maintaining my own instance?
Lemmur lets you add and browse multiple instances. We dont have any plans to develop our own, but the API is open for anyone to use.
But even within Lemmur (which is quite good, btw), I would still have to manually go and switch between my accounts to see content from each instance. There’s not a way for me, as a single user, to simultaneously look at two instances which are not federated with each other. The instance where my account exists is acting as a “gatekeeper” to the rest of the Lemmy-verse.
I say this with full awareness that it isn’t a problem at the current scale. I’m just thinking about network coherence as the user base expands and the federative complexity grows. I’m eventually going to want a tool that combines multiple instances into a single feed, even if those instances don’t talk to each other for some reason.
I suggest you open an issue for this in the Lemmur repo. It shouldnt be too hard to deduplicate posts and comments from different instances into a single feed.
Ah, good to know. So what I described is rather what you are proposing as the less strict version, right?
Yes.
In this case you would probably register on a third instance that both federate with.
