Hello! I hope this community is the right place to post this. I just had a quick question about federation; I’m trying to set up my account and follow some larger communities like those on lemmy.ml or beehaw.org. When I subscribe to one of those communities from Dataterm, is the entirety of that instance (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org) then federated with this instance? Or just the specific community (e.g., /c/gaming, /c/technology, etc)?
Also, how come some posts have different upvotes or comments depending on the instance theyr’re viewed from? For example, this post: Dataterm Version, lemmy.ml version has a huge disparity.
It also might help to understand the fundamental logic behind why that would be the case, which is simply, that dramatically reduces the amount of network resources eaten up, without impacting user experience.