Amber on Nostr: Let’s talk about what “silencing” is then, now that we have talked about remote ...

Let’s talk about what “silencing” is then, now that we have talked about remote suspend. Silencing is just telling server A that you want to disgard mail from server B *unless* it is addressed to someone in server A’s mailbox. That’s it, this is why when you silence an instance you can still see posts in regards to boosts, quotes, pings, replies. Silencing is pretty cool because it allows you to still get mail from server B while at the same time not being overwhelmed with all of the mail you want to discard. This sounds a bit over the top when you look at smaller instances hosting ~30 users. Imagine an apartment complex with 228k users. That is a lot of mail, especially when the mail is not sorted to see if there’s threats, illegal stuff and so on. Silencing can be a way of keeping two instances federated with each other, preserving existing connections and not dealing with unwanted connections.

Now, let’s look at what these sort of mailbox connections actually look like. These are numbers that are pulled from woem.men and transfem.social both instances as of writing this I am administrator of. Assuming woem.men is instance A here. Woem.men subscribes to 1,515 individual mailboxes from transfem.social (instance B). According to instance A, instance B has subscribed to 1,545 individual mailboxes. Keep in mind, user counts do not matter for these instances. 1 user can follow all of the users on transfem.social and vice versa. That is why they are so high compared to the user count of both instances. According to instance B (transfem.social) there are 1,628 subscribed to mailboxes from instance A. There are 1,439 mailboxes from instance A that are subscribed to instance B. How this plays out is because there is so much mail to send back and forth, the servers are constantly exchanging this mail. They are more up to date with each other because they constantly have to exchange mail. 3/?