A lingering question about Federation from a user perspective
Many of the subscriptions I'm making are to magazines that are coming from lemmy or other nstances because these are the ones making their way into my feed. Is there any downside to this in the fediverse?
Is there any reason (technical or otherwise) why I should prefer magazines that are at kbin.social (or kbin.anything) or does it literally not matter at all?
Edited to add: Thanks for all the good answers, I get it now!
You should spend less time on external instances and more on kbin. lemmy.ml has a weird moderation and the content you read is curated in their direction. The minute I can make a setting stick it will be to defederate with lemmy and cultivate my own garden here. Federation should be done on a trust basis, not on a "fear of missing out" basis. Be the content you want to read and post it here.
The federation system will soon switch to a whitelist only mode. The admins will quickly become fed up with all the pedo too enthusiast about finding a huge crowd to shock. It will be one scandal, two scandals and boom, whitelisted federation only.
@be_excellent_to_each_other in principle as that's the point of federation, it's value-neutral to participate in such comms.
But say you're concerned about downtimes or culture or you're anticipating that instance will not be reachable or even it increases traffic load, then maybe you'll find it sensible to support a local community or magazine
If there's a kbin mag, I'll consciously give preference to that one simply because I like kbin and I want it to be as active and healthy as others are. I have the ability to make it that. So there's that perspective, though admittedly I am subbed to 4 different crochet subs and 3 of them are lemmy by necessity.
I don't think there's any giant downside other than that and the possibility of losing your favored instance somehow, whether through defederation, catastrophic server crash, or another spez admin.
There doesn't seem to be, after fooling with it. I thought just @ kbin.social or the full url would force it, but it just returns less than the default page does.
I think because it goes off sub description, so if, say, a community on sh.itjust.works mentions or links some sister sub they have at lemmy.ca or something, they will come up in a search for lemmy.ca even though I tried to filter them out. Not a lot of kbin mags have any reason to mention they're kbin, so they don't even show up.
So that's a little bothersome, though at least not world-ending. At the very least, it seems to be given preference in the default sort, İ guess? If anyone wants to look through 100+ pages and see what strikes them
There are some minor things. Accessing communities on your own is probably more efficient in terms of server load. A community from your instance can never get cut off from you due to defederation.
But those are honestly just very minor things.
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