I've been on Lemmy for some time now and it's time for me to finally understand how Federation works. I have general idea and I have accounts on three federated instances, but I need some details.

Let Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta be four federated instances. I have an account on Alpha and create a post in a community on Beta. A persoson from Gamma comments on it and a person from Delta upvotes the post and the comment.

The question: On which instances are the post, the comment and the upvotes stored?

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[–] strepto@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It's stored on all 4.

Regardless of which on you create the content on, assuming they all federated with each other correctly, every instance hosts its own copy of your posts.

[–] sse450@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, data is not normalized. Isn't it a waste of storage? Same data on all instances.

[–] maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It isn't a waste if it provides redundancy and prevents one server from being in control of all data.

What do you mean by "normalized?"

[–] sse450@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I see your point.

I used the term "normalized" in the context of databases. One piece of data should exists only once. But, this contradicts your points of redundancy and control.

[–] bjornp_@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

That isn't what normalized means in the context of databases.

Also databases store the same data many times over often. For redundancy and load-balancing purposes. Really, federation just takes care of replication somewhat.

[–] maniacal_gaff@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Ok, I come from the signal processing world where that means something very different.

[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's not what "normalized" normalisation means in the context of databases.

[–] AbsolutelyNotABot@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The only objection I have with that is redundancy is useless because if the main server who "host" the community goes down then all the other copies will die too as content can't be added anymore.

There's no mechanic for orphan communities

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's mostly intended for caching content to speed up load times afaik

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