Questions about federation

🏷️ General
1

Hello !

When :

  • you federate server A (w/fast access) with server B (w/ slow access)
  • that people have access to server B but want to access the file X on server A
  • (file X being shared with everyone)

then

  • will people go through the slow connection of server B to access the content of server A ?

or

  • will people have direct access to file X, downloading at full speed on server A (w/ fast access) even though they are connected to server B ( which is slow) ?
2

You will always get the files from your server. The federated shared files are transferred directly between the servers.

3

I think there were some plans to enable direct P2P data exchange for local connection similar to how the Dropbox desktop client seem to do to speed up transfers on LAN connections?
Webtorrent technology might be a good way to do it and would also work for these kind of federated server setups.

4

I am not aware of any plans. There have been requests to implement such a LAN-sync but it would require some work to realize it. I know that people used syncthing or others to sync their clients and a server folder, they used this folder on the server as external storage.