view the rest of the comments
Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
They won't see the data of people they don't follow, and if they pop up and start following everyone they're going to get defederated.
Of course, it's relatively trivial to scrape the information without setting up a fediverse instance, so I don't think mastodon.prism.gov is something we'll need to worry about any time soon.
What sort of data are you talking about? I see posts and comments from people I don't follow in Local and All communities. Actually how do you follow an account in Lemmy?
So, on lemmy, you get content federated to you from remote instances by subscribing to communities on those remote instances. If a community exists on a remote instance, but no one from your instance subscribes to it, then no one on your instance will see any of the content posted to that community.
It works similar for mastodon and the regular fediverse, but in those cases, you follow people instead of communities.
Either way though, if no one from your instance subscribes to a particular remote account, be it a person or a community, then you don't get the content from that account on your instance.
Holy shit. TIL.
Thanks!
Fun fact, this is because lemmy communities are the same type of entity as mastodon accounts. They're basically a "person" to the rest of the Fediverse.
And they basically "boost" content to the timelines of accounts that subscribe (ie follow) the community account. Just like a boost on Mastodon.