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?

  • r00ty@kbin.life
    1·
    1 year ago

    What info do you think they will get? The only info is what you put in the public info on the user profile on your instance. So they can get your username (well user@instance), avatar, about info. That’s about it. Anything else like email address and password hashes are only stored on the instance you signed up to.

    • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      your votes are visible to all instances. it’s easier to think about when you think of voting like favoriting in mastodon except lemmy doesn’t send a notification

      • r00ty@kbin.life
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, I discussed this in another thread. There could be ways to protect this info. But, it would mean totally changing (and agreeing with all other threadiverse apps) the way this is handled. Even then, I’m not sure you could prevent exploitation if the full info isn’t sent. On kbin this info is visible anyway. You don’t need any fake instance to do it.

    • drekly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Every single comment and post anyone ever names and anything they are subscribed to. Run everyone’s content through some sentiment analysis, and now you have a great set of users, emails and their commonly used IP, grouped into interests, general mood, and political leanings, perfect for advertising.