It is a configuration that the admin of each instance sets up. The updating is done by bots that act like shuttles between servers in the background. The number and rate of these bots is what determines when and what information is shared.

Based on what I’ve seen, it looks like people making 3rd party apps are doing some scraping and stuff outside of the Lemmy API and have caused problems. Then they make waves instead of pull requests on the Lemmy git because none if them know Rust. It seems there is a tug of war of some sort in the background based on this issue. From what I gather, the problems center around .world. I don’t think they are going to get resolved either, which is quite sad. Some people seem to think they can use .world as some kind of launching point of piracy onto their new platform, but all they are doing is causing failure for a lack of big picture thinking. Between their drama and the elections psyops nonsense, participation is way down right now. I watch the max votes in the 1/6/12 hour top posts to see the actual averages. That likely represents somewhere between 1/3rd and 2/3rds of actual users in those time spans.