this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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How does Federating work? (latte.isnot.coffee)
submitted 1 year ago by melonplant@latte.isnot.coffee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Hi all, first time posting. I've tried googling a bit but its not totally clear to me. Say I have servers A, B, C, and D.

Can servers A and B federate, and then separately C and D federate?

If so, can A B and C be federated, but separately C and D be federated, so D is not recognized as federated for A?

If A, B, C, and D are federated, and it becomes apparent that D is a bad actor, how does D become defederated?

I feel like these kinds of situations are critical to ensure long term success. I really appreciate any answers anyone can provide!

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[โ€“] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can servers A and B federate, and then separately C and D federate?

Yes.

If so, can A B and C be federated, but separately C and D be federated, so D is not recognized as federated for A?

Yes.

If A, B, C, and D are federated, and it becomes apparent that D is a bad actor, how does D become defederated?

A, B, and C each individually decide whether they want to deferate with D. Maybe they all do, or maybe only some of them do. It's analogous to groups of people deciding who they want to be friends with.

At least that's my understanding.

[โ€“] melonplant@latte.isnot.coffee 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! This is an ideal method for keeping servers in check once user base starts gathering steam.

Side question but I assume servers have the ability to make communities private. Is there any segregation of content when it comes to federated users? For example, could you make content only visible to users, or federated users, or federated users from a specific server? Thinking in terms of bad actors exploiting bandwidth

[โ€“] MXYp3Lk66yKv@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From a philosophical perspective, it is complex.

This is a a simple start on Lemmy's federation

-Allowlist: Explicitly list instances to connect to.

-BlockList: Explicitly list instances to not connect to. Federation is open to all other instances.

-Open: Federate with all potential instances.

[โ€“] melonplant@latte.isnot.coffee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks this link is great!

Thinking long term, it feels like "open" or "blacklisting" methods are not sustainable. Bad-actor servers can come along much faster than servers can coordinate blacklisting. Is there any movement towards "factionalized" communities or whitelist groups? Hoping there's not a limit on number of whitelisted instances because it could get pretty long in the future.

[โ€“] MXYp3Lk66yKv@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

It's tricky. But I keep thinking that 'bad servers' bring similar issues to those of bad actors on 'good servers'....

Not sure how they might approach it - or what exactly is even available now. I should probably stand up a lemmy server just to have a poke around ๐Ÿซฃ.

[โ€“] qwacko 1 points 1 year ago

As far as I understand, a server (in Lemmy) can allow federation or limit it to what the server admin allows. Effectively you can think of federation as a two was subscription. The "host" server of a community has the entire community posts etc... And then anyone that subscribes to a community from a other server gets the updates etc... From the "home" server.

So for a single community (in your example hosted on server A for example), server B, C and D can "federate" to that server for that community, and there is no concept of B and D federatingb for that community.

So Lemmy is kind of similar to an old school forum, but with some magic of having shared logins, so you can loging with an account on a other server, and subsequently get updates into your feed.

If a server admin has issues with users or communities from a other server I believe they can use the concept of white-listing (only connect to specific servers) or black-listing (block specific servers) to "de-federate".

I am not an expert by any means, but this is my understanding.

Check out the following link to get "more correct" information. lemmy federation

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