I’ve been on Lemmy for some time now and it’s time for me to finally understand how Federation works. I have general idea and I have accounts on three federated instances, but I need some details.
Let Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta be four federated instances. I have an account on Alpha and create a post in a community on Beta. A persoson from Gamma comments on it and a person from Delta upvotes the post and the comment.
The question: On which instances are the post, the comment and the upvotes stored?
That isn’t what normalized means in the context of databases.
Also databases store the same data many times over often. For redundancy and load-balancing purposes. Really, federation just takes care of replication somewhat.