Streaming Baltimore Content

Federation

How your stories travel

A working model of the federation system. Edit the sample item below, flip switches across the four layers — platform, peer, author, viewer — and watch what each remote viewer actually sees on the Red Carpet, Profile, and Reviews surfaces of their peer instance.

Sample item

— as it appears on the home instance
Home preview
video preview Public
Mulholland Drive — first watch reactions
by Corey · Memphis, TN
#mulhollanddrive
Edit the item
Visibility
Locality
Memphis, TN
Hashtags
#mulhollanddrive

Network

— users grouped by instance, centered on you. Toggles below drive what flows.
View as:
PEER INSTANCE Brooklyn Reel PEER INSTANCE Durham Cinema HOME INSTANCE Crandell Cinema Bob follows Cara hashtag Dan locality Eve follows · locality YOU ARE HERE Corey Memphis, TN #mulhollanddrive
follows shares locality shares hashtag · gold + moving = receiving red = blocked · Surface: red carpet feed

What remote viewers see

— pick a surface; each viewer's feed renders below
Active surface:
Viewer's lens mode: — :global widens the tier filter to admit :open peers
Peer instance
Brooklyn Reel
Receiving
Bob on Brooklyn Reel
red carpet feed
video preview Public
Mulholland Drive — first watch reactions
by Corey · Memphis, TN
From: Memphis
#mulhollanddrive
As a balcony visitor here: present on /red_carpet — home feed slice merged
Cara on Brooklyn Reel
red carpet feed
video preview Public
Mulholland Drive — first watch reactions
by Corey · Memphis, TN
From: Memphis
#mulhollanddrive
As a balcony visitor here: present on /red_carpet — home feed slice merged
Peer instance
Durham Cinema
Receiving
Dan on Durham Cinema
red carpet feed
video preview Public
Mulholland Drive — first watch reactions
by Corey · Memphis, TN
From: Memphis
#mulhollanddrive
As a balcony visitor here: present on /red_carpet — home feed slice merged
Eve on Durham Cinema
red carpet feed
video preview Public
Mulholland Drive — first watch reactions
by Corey · Memphis, TN
From: Memphis
#mulhollanddrive
As a balcony visitor here: present on /red_carpet — home feed slice merged

Switches

— flip and watch the stage respond
Local author (Corey)

"Federation visible" controls inbound only — it hides federated content in Corey's own feeds. It does not stop Corey's content from being shipped to peers. Outbound is gated by item visibility, status, and frozen. (The User column is named hide_federated_content to keep the asymmetry explicit; this toggle shows the positive-affirmative reading.)

Remote viewers
Bob on brooklyn_reel
Cara on brooklyn_reel
Dan on durham_cinema
Eve on durham_cinema
Platform
Peer — Brooklyn Reel
Peer tier
Suppress hashtag
Peer — Durham Cinema
Peer tier
Suppress hashtag

What's happening

Content is flowing to all 2 peers. Each remote viewer's visibility depends on whether they follow the author, share a locality, or share a hashtag — and whether their own federation_visible toggle is on.

Try a scene
How users control scope

Most discovery pages — reviews, browse, upcoming, venues, creators — carry a simple Local / All scope toggle. The red carpet feed has its own three-way switch instead: Crew · Local · All, plus a hashtag-global mode for following a tag across the whole network.

"Local" still pulls in content from other instances — it asks the peers serving your locality. Whether peer content is allowed in the first place is decided separately by the platform's federation switch and your own "show federated content" preference. Both have to be on, or no peer content blends in at all.

Balcony users — visitors logged in here via single sign-on from another instance — see this site with their identity intact. Each viewer card above notes what they'd experience as a balcony visitor on this instance. When a balcony user reads a review here, their comments and likes are sent back to the review's home instance instead of being recorded locally.

Their Red Carpet here also blends in a slice of their home-instance feed — the same crew-scoped feed they'd see at home, fetched on the fly and merged with whatever this instance was already going to show them. If they have "show federated content" turned off in their hub panel, the slice is suppressed; otherwise it arrives async and the feed re-renders once it lands.

For a full reference of how federation behaves on each page, see the federation cross-page reference.

Open questions
  • Cached content has no retraction. When platform federation flips off, peers keep showing already-cached posts. Sessions get evicted instantly, but content does not. Is that intentional, or should there be a federated retraction signal?
  • Trust circle vs. tier filtering. The lens treats :global mode differently for trust-circle peers, but the rule isn't documented in plain English anywhere.
  • Federated hashtag suppression is one-way. We drop suppressed names locally, but never check whether the originating peer also moderates them. Should suppression be bilateral?
  • Unlisted-until-start transition. When a scheduled event goes live, when and how do remote instances learn about it? No test or doc covers this transition.
  • The "hide federated content" toggle is inbound-only — by design. A user's own outbound content still ships to peers regardless of this setting; only item-level visibility, status, and frozen account flags gate outbound. This is deliberate (your content's reach is a content property, not a viewer property), but the asymmetry is worth surfacing in copy.