A thing I haven't found the answer to, neither in the ActivityPub standards or in the docs for setting up a mastodon server, is how federation takes place?
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A thing I haven't found the answer to, neither in the ActivityPub standards or in the docs for setting up a mastodon server, is how federation takes place?
I get the parts that posts are sent to followers inboxes.
But what do mastodon servers (to limit the question, but feel free to jump in for other servers) do with public posts that ends up in one of their users' inboxes?
Do they put these posts in the public feed for their own users?
cont. in next post #activitypub #mastodon
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Do they share these posts with other servers, even though nobody on those servers is following the poster?
How is the list of other servers defined? Is there a configured list or is it just the list of servers they have users on?
Is there a schedule for exchanging posts?
Or do servers just piggy back shared posts on other communication with that server?
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to Steinar Bang last edited by
@steinarb I can't speak for all of AP, just Mastodon since it's mostly the only software ive been on for over a year now.
With Mastodon, federation specifically works by follow relationships. If you start a new instance, don't follow anyone, nobody follows you, and you don't add any relays, I'm almost positive your posts won't go anywhere.
Once follow relationships are established, as long as the posts are "public" then yes, they get sent to the instances public timelines that receive them.
It's also to keep in mind boosts, the singular posts that are boosted also make it to the public timelines.
There's no "schedule", there's a queue. Every server/instance has a "SideKiq" queue that handles all jobs coming in or going out and depending on how active their federation is and the hardware of the server, defines how long those queues take to process those jobs and federate them.
I hope this all makes sense and is at least partially the answers you were looking for.