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Let's ask this question, @diaspora* HQ, shall we?

If a small pod follows a tag (say, #diaspora) then will the pod pull in (show) all messages on all pods tagged by this specific, followed tag?
Or following it will only show local tagged messages on the specific small pod, either created locally or followed by a local user?

So, if a small pod follows a popular tag, despite that large pods (like diasp.org) has hundred posts a day the small pod user will see probably none of them?

#diaspora @diaspora* HQ
Fla
Fla  
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Hello. The diaspora federation is working with push, not pull. So pods will send posts to the other pods where users have a contact. There is unfortunately no way at the moment to "subscribe" for tags from other pods. I wrote a proposal about this a long long time ago, but it did not go any further.
So, if you have a small pod, the only way to receive content is to add interesting people to your aspect. If you don't want your main account to be polluted by too many posts, you can do the following:
- Create an empty account
- Check posts on some big pods to find interesting people (so http://diasp.org/tags/music if you are interested about this for example
- Add the accounts you discovered to an aspect in your empty account
- Now your pod will receive the posts.
- Follow the tags you want with your real account, and they will appear in your stream ;)

#music

Posts tagged: music
diaspora social network
grin ✅
grin ✅  
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Thanks @Fla, I suspected it so but a bunch of old-timers here around kept telling me I'm wrong. I am now ready to fight back! 😉

So it basically the same effect as for ActivityPub/Mastodon: the network is segmented and has different/distinct local-server view of the world. Unfortunately this leads to large centralised servers since people need public streams and global follow (and search, by the way).

@Fla
Robbie
Robbie  
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Um, wait: Following people instead of #tags makes better federation? I kinda get that, but I wonder how I would find people to follow other than tags.
#tags
grin ✅
grin ✅  
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@Robbie the problem is the federation, as method: it means that you only see what you are subscribed to, you are "subscribing" the remote content provider (person on a different server) so when the person posts sends you a copy. It's kind of "pulling" very specific posts from remote servers to local server.

Any further than that, like "public posts stream", "followed tags", "search" is done on the locally present content on the pod. If the content locally created by a local user or anyone have pulled it from a remote pod then it will be followable by tags. Otherwise it will not exist for the local users.

Right now there are bad and worse methods. Like, joining a few large "centralised" pods and looking around, and subscribing locally people you've seen there. Or doing that with code, basically "scraping" content emulating the missing proxy/relay feature. (It has been described by the same Fla you see above here.)


User should be able to follow tags on other pods · Issue #2407 · diaspora/diaspora

Following tags is very nice, but when Diaspora* is used on a small local pod (rather than say joindiaspora.com) the experience is quite different: if you have 1-5 users, almost nothing happens and ...
GitHub
@Robbie
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