Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

Averrin@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 15 points –

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Did you mean that child comments are not federated?

I don't think that's correct.

I think you're right, I may have misinterpreted the documentation. I attached a screenshot below.

So that's why there were no comments when I searched a post from a remote instance. You need to search the comments individually. It's kinda weird design imo.

once you subscribe to a community all new comments and posts get federated, but yeah if you just search for the post then you can't seethe comments unless you search for them