this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Fascinating... My practical web knowledge is stuck back in 1.0, but it seems to me that the web server could maybe be set up to do this just based on URL parsing. I mean, you've got a URL like,
https://possumpat.io/c/mapporncirclejerk@lemmy.world
Prior to you pulling that in, it was still running some sort of backend script that generated the "couldnt_find_community" page... Is there some reason that script couldn't do a remote fetch? Seems like all the information you need is in the URL.
Though I guess there's a broader question about how federation works... Does the Patio cache posts and comments from other instances? If it does, is that push-style or pull-style—i.e., if someone makes a post on a remote community that the Patio is federated with, does the remote instance tell the Patio "hey guuuuuuuuuuuys I gotta new post for ya," or does the Patio periodically go out and ask other instances what new posts they have?
I totally agree that it should just try to pull/search for the remote community if you give it a url it doesn't recognize - I think it's just an feature oversight with how Lemmy is designed right now.
ActivityPub, the protocol that Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc. all use, is "Push based" as I understand it. Think of it kind of like email, we don't know about new posts/upvotes/comments until it arrives in our inbox. When someone here subscribes to a remote community, we're telling that remote server "hey, include me in your distribution list for this stuff." Check out the link above, the spec is pretty detailed and imo makes for some interesting reading!
I noticed something today and I'm curious if it's related to this conversation--
When I look at the browser-based pages for larger instances, I get a ton of "All-New" posts that I don't see when I'm using possumpat.io's "All-new" sort function (in browser or in jerboa).
If lemmy is "push based", does that mean we're only getting "All-New" posts from communities where at least one of our members is subscribed? Specifically, it doesn't seem like we get posts from instances where at least one person is subscribed to one community, because I don't see "All-New" posts from most of the communities on lemmy.world despite having subscribed to a few of its communities, for example.
If so.... dang that sucks! I've been feeling a little surprised at how few new posts I see, but then I see posts on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml talking about how they literally can't stop the flow of new posts!
Yep, that's how it works - every post in "All" is coming from at least one person on our instance being subscribed to that community. This one reason why I'd like to hit a sweet spot of a couple hundred users - Eventually we'll get enough remote subscriptions that it'll feel like a firehose of content.
If there's stuff you want to see, I'd highly suggest going and spelunking on other instances and finding new communities to get things bootstrapped. I've been digging around once a day or so myself, so I'm confident in a few weeks we'll be seeing more stuff than we could ever want. 🙂
Edit: Also worth mentioning, this is yet another pain point that developers are looking at: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
This is fascinating - thanks for explaining why things don't always show up by default. It's time for us to get out there and populate our ALL section, it seems! :)