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The original was posted on /r/fediverse by /u/pgess on 2023-08-25 08:25:22+00:00.

Hello, I am new to the federated media concept, perhaps these questions already answered.

I imagine federated media as a notification network of nodes(news outlets and consumers) connected via subscription links regardless if they live on the same server or different ones. I imagine basically the network should work as follows:

  • Pull model: if a node has updates(i.e. some news), its subscribers receive(“pull”) the news whether they registered on a different sever or not. Basically as RSS, they poll the server regularly for any updates. They may relay(share) the news further down the subscription network if they choose so.
  • Push model: if a node has updates it may send them(“push”) to nodes with bigger audience for spreading, i.e. group nodes. If a group node deems news relevant it may relay the news to its subscribers. Group nodes may serve as a topic aggregator(religious or space-related news), as a tag(funny), or as an automatic/manual reviewer(to mark truthful and honest news as such).
  • If the user want to comment they go directly to the server the original news comes from, regardless of how many hops it traveled through sharing and re-sharing and post their comments there. So everybody would see the same comments in real time.

Now from technical side, I see this more or less as load balancing solution, except that individual servers get owned by different parties. From UX side, the user pays no attention about particular server serving the content, focusing on who to subscribe to instead, except in the beginning facing hurdle of choosing right server to register at.

Hence, my questions are:

How real implementation is conceptually different from my understanding? Why there are “Local” and “All” news. Why users sometimes complain about seeing different snapshots of post or comments? What’s the point of different servers caching content of another servers if this is a case? Why users complain that content on the same topic different from server to server? A lot of stuff looks very confusing.