Understanding Mastodon Federation: Original and Local Pages

Understanding Mastodon Federation: Original and Local Pages

As you may have heard, Mastodon is a distributed platform. More precisely it is part of the Fediverse. What does this mean? Well first, unlike Twitter or Facebook it means that there is no centralized server that sources all the content. Instead there are many servers which all talk to each other.

When you join Mastodon, you actually join one of these servers, also called your instance. When you see content on Mastodon it is always provided to you by your instance.

But wait, how then can you see posts from other instances? This is where it gets a little tricky. When you follow somebody on another instance, their posts are copied to your instance server. Huh?

Check theses two addresses out (spaces inserted):

https: // newsie.social / @ damemagazine

https:// mastodon.online / @ damemagazine @ newsie.social

The first address is the “original page” address for DAME Magazine. Note DAME is hosted on newsie.social. The second address is the mastodon.online copy or “local page” for DAME Magazine. When anyone on mastodon.online views DAME Magazine content, that is what they are seeing.

What happens behind the scenes is that the Fediverse (more precisely, the ActivityPub protocol) tries to keep both copies the same, updating the local pages whenever the original page is changed.

Now, let’s look at individual posts. Again check out these two addresses:

Original page: https: // newsie.social / @ damemagazine / 109870621759977152

Local page: https: // mastodon.online / @ damemagazine@newsie.social / 109870621925751567

When you view a post from your account you are looking at your instance server’s local page. When you reply to the post (or boost or favorite), you update that local page. Then ActivityPub kicks in and sends your update to the original page server. The original page server then deals the update out to all the other local pages on other servers.

So, hopefully everyone then has identical copies. This may not always be true, but let’s leave that for another time.

A confusing thing about this distributed stuff, is that when you want to find a post, or reference a post to someone else on a different server, you need the original page version of that post.

Click on the three dots on the bottom right of any post and choose the top pop-up selection “Open original page”. This will open the original page version of the post in a new window.

But, now you can no longer interact with that post, because you are directly viewing the original page as served by the post author’s server, and you are not a member of that instance. You are outside of your account.

However, this is the post address you want if you are going to refer someone to this post. For example, if you copy and paste this address into a post of yours referencing this post other users will be able to click on it to bring up this original page.

But, now they will need to get to their local page for this post so they can respond. This used to be a really annoying problem with Mastodon, but the latest software has provided two nice new features. First, you can just click on reply (or boost or favorite) on the original page and Mastodon will throw up a pop-up where you can enter your server address and click “Take me home.” Alternatively, you can copy the original page address, and paste it into your # Explore search box. Then, under Quick Actions, at the top of the pop-up below the search box click on “Open URL in Mastodon.”

Hope that clears up some of the confusion regarding federation of posts on Mastodon. Admittedly this is not as easy or straightforward as we might like it to be, but this awkwardness needs to be balanced against the advantages of the Fediverse’s distributed open social media platform.

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This post comes from the WordPress Mastodon Migration Blog: https://mastodonmigration.wordpress.com/

You can receive all new posts to this WordPress Blog by following Mastodon account:

https://mastodonmigration.wordpress.com/@mastodonmigration.wordpress.com

(Copy and paste above address into search to find and follow)

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