this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
108 points (95.8% liked)
Lemmy.ca's Main Community
3612 readers
10 users here now
Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!
All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.
For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use [email protected].
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel like people are missing the question that is really being asked here.
The way I read the question is "How are the individual federated servers able to interact?"
I mean, there has to be some sort of system somewhere that helps the servers connect to each other. How does Lemmy.ca know that Lemmy.world exists? There must be some sort of authority that knows. There must be some sort of first step when a new instance appears that lets everyone know that the new server exists.
Unless it's like routers and routing tables but that only works because of the physical structure allowing it, a federated server isn't going to reach out to its nearest neighbor and see another federated server. When you start a new server, do you have to like... pick an existing federated server to... like... knock on the door of? Give them a pie and tell them that you're in the neighborhood now?
I don't know the answer to this question... But I like the pie idea.
The way I've seen this work previously on fedi is that people post "hey I made a new server, please boost for reach". That effectively announces the existence of the server to the network. It can be difficult to get noticed at first, if you are a single-user instance without many followers.