I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
I have a question about communities. Are communities server-specific, for example, is the “Gaming” community on lemmy.ml different from the one on, say, beehaw.org and will I need to join both?
Do instances “subscribe” to get the communities of other instances? Or how does it work the “all” filter?
Instances don’t subscribe. People follow federated communities. So you can type !gaming@beehaw.org into the search bar here, and subscribe to it.
Yeah, I understand that, it’s why I used subscribe in quotes since I didn’t know to phrase it better.
My question is, how an instance knows about the communities of other instances so they appear when changing from “local” to “all”?
Is it only until a user searches for them in that instance? Before that both instances are unknown to each other?
Or is there a config so one instance tries to always be updated of other instances?
Federation is based on a push methodology, that happens after a subscribe. The flow is that I subscribe to a federated community, and that community’s server now knows my activitypub id, and can push community posts and comments to my servers inbox. The connection happens after that first subscribe.