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?
What does “actively federate” mean? What does it mean to be “inactively federating”?
What impact does it have on the user of these instances?
The default is that any instance can federate, but only after a user actively requested that it is added to the list of linked instances. There is no central relay or so that tells an instance which other instances exists, so it needs to build up a list of known linked instances.