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?
Even with open federation an instance needs to know about other instances before they can actively push updates to them. This is what “linked” means.