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.

Pick a scenario

Network

— users grouped by instance, centered on you. Toggles below drive what flows.

View as:

Active surface:

Viewer's feed scope:

follows shares locality shares hashtag · gold + moving = receiving red = blocked · Surface: red carpet feed

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.

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

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

More scenarios

How scope works

Your feed has a three-way switch — Crew · Local · All — plus a hashtag mode for following a tag across the whole network. Even "Local" can pull in posts from other sites serving your area.

Two things have to be on for any content from other sites to appear: this site's federation switch, and your own "show federated content" preference. Turn either off and you only see this site's own posts.