I introduced kbin to someone today who asked what the fediverse was. I answered for them of course, but it made me realize that the concept is still technobabble for most people. The average joe probably doesn’t care or notice that server A is really talking to server B. Just have them find out on their own and if a mass migration does need to happen from A to B, just make a standard announcement.
You can’t show anyone anything “from all [blank] instances”, though. There’s no centralized server that they all phone home to. There’s no mechanism for them to learn about each other except through user exploration.
So there’s no way to see non-kbin content without going and subscribing to another instances magazines?
Bingo. Someone on the site has to follow remote content in order for the site to receive it. So long as one person is subscribed, it will land here, and become searchable via regular search.
New Fediverse sites pop up every day. They don’t register with any kind of central authority, and, indeed, if no one on those sites subscribes to remote users or groups, and no one off-site subscribes to local users or groups, the site is in effect unfederated.
Ooh I did not realize this but it makes sense.
A dumb follow-up then if I may… if I don’t see a particular magazine I’m looking for (so it either doesn’t exist or no one from this site has subscribed to it yet), how do I search other instances to see if it exists anywhere else?