Can someone point me to a good technical 101 for Mastodon? Or OStatus? Trying to understand: When I make a post, how does another instance find out about it to show to my followers there or the federated timeline?
So I think it's the PubSubHubbub portion that does what I'm looking for.
Current understanding: I make a post & my instance pushes that post to each instance where someone follows me.
Which means if some single-user instance's user follows me, but no one on my instance (including me) follows them, then my instance is "aware" of theirs, but not in a way that their posts would show up on our federated timeline.
Anybody poke holes in that?
I'm chasing this because someone mentioned the idea of a new privacy setting where your instance would more closely federate with a short list of other instances (forming a slightly larger community). Basically a list of other instances your posts would go to that wasn't Just Everyone in the Federation:tm:. I'm trying to understand how that might work on a technical level and it doesn't sound super hard or breakey.
@benhamill Instances such as https://awoo.space use a whitelisting vs. blacklisting approach to federation. It would also be possible to allow federation with all instances but limit the federated timeline to a subset. An instance can't do much about where toots go once they leave the instance though. Privacy is difficult in a federated system.
@binary @NthTensor In this case, though, if you posted with the new setting, it would just never notify those instances not in the allow-list. And you'd still have the "Public" setting that would go wherever.
Boosts and such could potentially break your post out, but that's true of Unlisted and Private today, right?
@benhamill @NthTensor I think that's right.