The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
If that's genuinely the way it works, it seems really dumb.
Fetch data from instances you're trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
How would you do it?
Fetch data from instances you're trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
That's exactly what happens. But you have to store the fetched data on your instance if you want to display it there.