Yes, I’m definitely not understanding something. You said that Mastodon only sends upvotes to the instance of the user receiving the like, in this case feddit.dk, right? Then why, if I view the post on feddit.dk, does it not show me those likes/votes? What is dependent on my instance?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 week ago
I don’t understand what you mean, how does it now show you the likes? If you see the two comments here and here as I linked above, you can see the high upvote count. Almost all the upvotes are from Mastodon instances.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Sorry, I mean when I view the comment via my instance. I don’t understand why my instance needs to receive the votes/likes directly, instead of my instance fetching them from feddit.dk when I request the comment.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 week ago
Your instance doesn’t pull the upvotes from other instances. That would not be scalable. How would it know when to pull again, to see new upvotes? When would it stop pulling periodically? Never? And you’d have to do this for every single post and comment everywhere.
No, instead ActivityPub uses a push mechanism here. So any new activity is pushed out to the ones that are deemed relevant to know about the activity. Any other instances are unaware.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Pulling the data when a user requests a post/comment (with a cooldown/cache for popular posts) isn’t any more or less scalable than feddit.de pushing the same data whether it’s been requested or not. If anything, I’d think pushing data when it’s not necessarily needed would be less scalable.
But if it has to be a push model, why doesn’t feddit.dk push the votes it knows about along with the rest of the data?