Now I could turn this whole problem on it’s head and propose a new Lemmy to Lemmy JSON data transport. Define some tables and conventions for blobs of JSON data to be shared between instances. PostgreSQL functions can parse JSON and work with it too. It could be as simple as having an API client and requiring operators to run an app to poll it… this could have future uses such as backfill replication.

Federation is very message oriented, not a general purpose means to transport data… from what I’ve seen so far. But I could see things develop where people want to use Lemmy as kind of a data-replication and sharking platform for things related to the central purpose.