submitted 9 months ago by sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm curious, if I'm subscribed to a community on an instance, why doesn't Lemmy "unlock" all of the communities on said instance. I've found that despite being subscribed to a few on an instance, my instance seems ignorant of other stuff happening on the instance.

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[-] Amir@lemmy.ml 18 points 9 months ago

Scalability. This is much better for people running a lemmy instance without terabytes of disk space.

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 13 points 9 months ago

subscriptions are per-community

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago

You shine a torch at someone in the dark, you can see more than just them though

[-] SheeEttin@programming.dev 11 points 9 months ago

Yeah but that's a waste of light. Why use a floodlight when you can use a laser?

[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 6 points 9 months ago

in america, we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 4 points 9 months ago

You still have maps and GPS though.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago

So im guess you’re asking why things behave this way?

There are two parts.

Synchronising all of the data from all of the communities would consume more data and network resources. So instead, it’s only done if a user subscribes. Should help save on some data and synchronisation.
You may also want to know that a community exists on another instance even though you’ve never subscribed to it. And that’s fair IMO. Being able to explore what’s on another instance directly from yours makes sense. But that’s what the other instance is for. Go to their web page and explore from there. This is a decentralised system. Sure there are some rough edges … like being able to subscribe directly from the other instance should help smooth over the UX (and I think this might have been added in v0.19?)

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 5 points 9 months ago

Thanks for the useful insight.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

No worries!!

[-] chris@l.roofo.cc 6 points 9 months ago

The ActivityPub protocol works by sending out every action on one server to any subscribed server. The subscribed servers save this data and make it available to the local users. If it worked the way you described, every server on the fediverse would store all the data from the whole fediverse. That seems wasteful.

this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024

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