This is interesting: I followed 3 accounts on 3 other Masto servers. @robertwgehl federated with us. Now the federated list shows 100 instances connected with us. Most of them with a single user. The masotodon.social shows 23 users, when I only followed one on that instance. Clearly, this federation thing is more complicated than I thought. #insights

@ggow this note from Gargron explains it a bit: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment-294300073

@robertwgehl I'd like to be able to understand the federation concept well enough to explain it to students as a fundamental techno-social affordance. It seems important in the context of the rhizomatic scaling of ASM instances. Perhaps we can set this as a challenge for ourselves to write up a short article on federation. Would you be up for that?

@ggow I would, actually. I feel like I could explain it before I actually studied it, if you know what I mean. It's more complex than I first thought!

@robertwgehl exactly. It seemed kind of obvious .... and, well, now it doesn't! I suspect it might be one of those projects that opens several related avenues of inquiry.

@robertwgehl how to proceed? maybe we start by locating documented sources that discuss the federation concept from a non-tech or tech-light perspective? Then go from there.