bdonvr

Nooooot exactly.

See the way federation works is that each community on each instance has a list of other instances that has at least one subscriber on it. Every time someone does something on that community, such as commenting/voting/posting, it sends that information out to every instance on its list.

So say there's three instances (A, B, and C).

A has 1000 users.

B has 500

C has 10,000

Let's say they're all subscribed to some particular community on instance B.

A user on Instance A comments on a post. Instance A sends this comment to Instance B. Instance B tells Instance C about it so everybody is synced up (and presumably, tells A just to confirm they've received it).

So one action means instance B has to send out 1 or 2 messages to other servers, and in just those two messages was able to serve 11k users (plus it's own 500)

Now let's say all 11,500 users ran their own instance, and this community was on one of them. Again, it's a super popular community and everyone else is subscribed. Call it instance X.

Now, someone comments on a post on this community. Instance X now has to send a message to 11,499 instances. Every single action on this hypothetical network will cause several thousand messages to fly between them. Not efficient to say the least.

Very nice!

User settings on the website, underneath the theme option

A few days ago I heard from a BeeHaw.org admin that their whole instance only takes 25GB right now. But it's always good to be prepared to scale up I suppose.

There's rough edges to be sure but the community seems pretty good and the devs seem like they're working hard.

Right now I'm seeing less time spent endlessly scrolling as more of a feature than a bug lmao, need to break that habit anyway

As I was able to confirm, looks like anyone else on the same instance can see my downvotes. But not anyone on any other instance, even if they have downvotes too.

Okay so I've confirmed it.

When downvoting content on an instance that doesn't allow downvotes, you can see only the downvotes that come from other users on your instance. I can see two downvotes now, which happened just after I used a second account to downvote.

Downvoted as well. Looks like no since other people have also downvoted you and you're still at 1

I'll have to test- maybe other users on my instance can see my downvotes, but they won't federate because BeeHaw rejects them. And therefore no other instance can see them.

Edit: Okay so I've confirmed it.

When downvoting content on an instance that doesn't allow downvotes, you can see only the downvotes that come from other users on your instance. I can see two downvotes now, which happened just after I used a second account to downvote.

Well you're a beehaw user. I'm not, and I can actually downvote things here. I'm just not sure if it actually effects anything.

How does it work if a user on another instance (that has downvotes enabled) downvotes comments on BeeHaw.org communities? Are they ignored? Can other instances see them?

Same here - https://lemmy.rogers-net.com

Looking to keep mine small like 100 users (I'll see how much resources that takes, then decide if I want more) so I don't incur large bills but want to do my part. Not really anticipating any real "local" community but since everything is federated, you can always subscribe to any communities on any other instances and just live in your "Subscribed" tab, fully enjoying the Lemmy experience like any big instance. And of course users on other instances can use a community you set up here.

Federates with NSFW servers (that don't have abhorrent content, I defederated/blocked burggit), if that's something you're looking for.

Keep in mind that the upcoming Lemmy update will probably fix this I think. (Replacing websockets)