Yeah, runaway global warming might not happen. Plant monocultures would begin to disappear. New invasive species wouldn’t happen, though existing ones might have a better time for a bit. Major thoroughfares wouldn’t create barriers to migration. Dams might take centuries to collapse, but I think humans going extinct might have one of the biggest impacts.

Upvotes and downvotes.

Right now, I can browse by New on my subscribed communities and see every post since the last time I did that.

I can view or re-view posts and read every response. If the responses are legion, I can play with hot/top and get the meat of the discussion.

Did you notice that last sentence? On the few posts where there are too many responses to view all, I’ll try to get at those that are relevant.

If the Lemmy community grows large enough, I’ll need to do the same for posts. I will no longer be able to regularly view by new and have time to see everything.

So, I’ll need to rely on some sorting method to make certain I see relevant stuff.

Someone with millions of bots that never post have millions of upvotes and downvotes to influence the score used by the sorting algorithm that I’ll use to decide what to read.

But aren’t thumbnails local?

Part of what prompted my question is that I doubt I have the correct worldview because I believe I’m influenced.

Very interesting.

Great to hear!

That’s my guess too if Lemmy takes off. I’d imagine some will be obvious enough that everyone defedrates from that server, stranding the legit users. I’m not sophisticated enough to know how to defend against this, but I’m intrigued by the concept.

But again, that’s if you are viewing the community via the server you are subscribed to. For me, that would be https://sh.itjust.works/c/apple@lemmy.ml for the community and https://sh.itjust.works/post/8299 for the direct link. I just see 5 posts, which is less than either the original or the server OP is on.

My language settings shouldn’t matter when viewing servers I’m not logged in with. I do have both English and Undefined checked and only see 5 posts on that thread in sh.itjust.works.

The person you are replying to deleted the comment. That said, as I understand it, comments are federated once someone on a server subscribes. So, not all comments will be federated. However, stuff listed in the comments here would seem to break my understanding of how federation works. I’m very curious to hear the answers.

No problem. You’ve probably been here longer than me. We’re all trying to figure this out. The question reveals issues I wasn’t aware of. You actually mentioned something that would be relevant in some situations that taught me something. I was just pointing out that I didn’t think your suggestion applied here.

All of us Reddit refugees are trying to figure out the nuances. I appreciate your comment because it taught me something new.

But, that should only matter when viewing via a logged in server. Those two links are to communities directly on servers. I suppose it’s possible no one on lemmy.sdf.org has subscribed to that community. That could explain the original question but doesn’t explain the example posted by @caio@sh.itjust.works example of https://lemmy.ml/post/1136642 vs https://lemmy.fdvrs.xyz/post/1436

(How do I get a link to reference a comment that works everywhere?)

I’m also curious about how it works with a mix of subscribed communities. When I sort my subscribed comments, Hot seems similar (identical?) to New. Active does give me interesting stuff, but hides things I’d be interested in from smaller communities.

I’d like a mix that gives me those more popular posts I’m interested in, but also gives me the less active posts from smaller communities.

You’d need some way of calculating a scaled score of each post in each separate community, then providing a method of sorting all posts using that scaled score. That is, some way to realize a post in a 100 member community with 25 upvotes and 200 comments may be more relevant in a subscriber list compared to a post with 200 upvotes and 100 comments in a community of 10,000.

Of course, I’m not sure I’d want the same scoring mechanism used in all as opposed to subscribed. I want to see the niche but interesting stuff in my subscribed communities. I’m not sure I want that when looking at all, or at least not to the same extent.

If you can grok that we’re basically all on different, independent web forums, and there’s just an implicit agreement between the forums to cross-post and share content, you can better grok why somethings that will happen here happen.

I’m old enough to have participated in Usenet before web servers existed, with the idea that different Usenet servers carried different feeds. Now that I better understand it, that model is closer than my original understanding. I also realize it’s not a completely accurate model, since there’s no central hierarchy to the fediverse like Usenet had, but at least it works to get me to understand the idea that all interactions are going through the server I’m pointed at and that posts originating from other servers across the fediverse are being replicated to my server so I can interact.

Oh, I didn’t take your comment as critical. I was asking because there’s lots I don’t understand. You clarified a basic misunderstanding I had. I appreciate it.

Thanks. Based on some of the other answers, particularly in https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12511, I know understand better.

I appreciate everyone helping to explain some pretty basic questions in such detail.

Thanks. That was an incredibly detailed response that answers the questions I was asking.

Doesn’t the fact that every Lemmy server has a copy of every federated post mean that if Lemmy takes off, only a few people with strong donation feeds can afford to survive?

If there’s an active forum (sub-lemmy?) on a server that has to spin down, the history stays on the remaining active ones, but I assume the only option is forking?

Moderation can only happen on the server hosting a forum, or each server can moderate posts in that server’s db?