Amber on Nostr: Heavily simplified analogy of fediverse federation for the people new to the ...

Heavily simplified analogy of fediverse federation for the people new to the fediverse. All your instance is doing when you post is sending out your post as if it was an envelope to everyone on the list. To get on the list, you must subscribe. Fediverse instances are a lot like a group mailbox seen at an apartment complex. The difference between a single user instance, and an instance with a couple users is simple. If you have a single user instance, the mailman (in this case, other servers that are dispatching mail to you) will come through with only mail meant for you. When you have multiple users, the server will dispatch that mail in bulk. It will give your server the ability to organize it in the mailboxes itself. The big problem here is that in order to get mail you must subscribe to get mail. How do you subscribe to things that you aren’t aware of yet? We have a variety of options here.

A relay would equivalent to your server walking down to your local postal office. A central place for other servers to pick up mail. Each server when they come into the postal office will take a collection of mail (well, as long as the mail is not addressed to anyone in particular such as with private posts), and will hand each server in the post office a copy. Your server comes back with this mail. What it does with this mail can really depend on the configuration, but you can see the unorganized mail on several softwares by going to “global/firehose” tab. Now, not every software supports relays. Not every server wants to be attached to a relay since that’s a lot of mail to handle without any assumption that it’s relevant. Once two servers have met, and there is subscribers between them is when it gets interesting. 1/?