This applies to any of the microblogging software. Akkoma, IceShrimp, etc. I go to any Lemmy instance, big or small, and the up/downvote data and replies are basically all the same. The same goes for Peertube, and most services that aren’t Mastodon and the gang. Why is this? Is it because of older design? Unexpected issues cropping up with scale? It seems to be such a big struggle over there, but for everyone else, it’s whatevs.
I would love to permanently reside on a smaller Mastodon instance or host my own, but I often find that many posts are unavailable and a lot of replies I want to reply to don’t exist. It is an incredibly frustrating experience.
Lemmy and lots of other software use a fediverse extension called 1b12 to keep everything in sync.
In a nutshell it means Lemmy communities can follow other communities, and they keep each other in sync. The same applies for other types of communities, like PieFed communities, Mbin magazines, NodeBB categories, etc.
Mastodon doesn’t have a concept of community or categories, so they don’t support this kind of synchronization.
Thank you, this makes sense. Is there any hope for Mastodon and other services to achieve a similar level of parity without eating up a ton of space? I feel like it is a big hurdle for Fedi, but I understand these things take time and a ton of work.
Sure, check out my post about it here:
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18844/backfilling-conversations-two-major-approaches
There are steps being taken in the right direction.
This was very interesting! While I don’t fully understand everything, based on what I can, I’m partial to the second one. If the the instance disappears, I doubt the hoster wants that stuff up anyway. It makes it easier on everyone, and the replies seem (?) to stay up as well. A win-win. Either way it goes, I can only be thankful to the engineers working so hard to make this a reality. 🙏
Thanks! It’s something that I personally feel is more performant and future proof for other important things like private discussions (which Mastodon also doesn’t support natively yet — mention spamming doesn’t count.)