If you query the lemmy API, you get a ton of fun JSON data:
One thing interesting that I saw was huge lists of other federated servers in the federated_instances dictionary.
There’s three arrays in there:
- linked
- allowed
- blocked
What do each of these mean, and what impact does it have on the server when they’re set to some list of hosts or if they’re null?
Linked just means they actively federate, allowed is a remnant from when the federation was strictly allow-list based in the early days (might be still possible to enable as a site admin), and blocked means exactly that.
What does “actively federate” mean? What does it mean to be “inactively federating”?
What impact does it have on the user of these instances?
The default is that any instance can federate, but only after a user actively requested that it is added to the list of linked instances. There is no central relay or so that tells an instance which other instances exists, so it needs to build up a list of known linked instances.
So if a user searches for a community on another instance, does that mean that the instance that they’re following is automatically added to the
linkedlist or no?If so, does that happen when they subscribe or when they search?
As far as I know, yes. I am not 100% sure if searching but not interacting is sufficient. But I think a reply is sufficient, not only actual subscriptions.
Interesting. So I guess that functionality is disabled when the admin has a non-null list set for
allowedYes, that is the point of a strict allow-list.