About the infrastructure for the iNaturalist network

I’m writing an advocacy article for iNaturalist from a technical, decentralized web perspective and I’d love to know more about the ins and outs of how the tech behind the iNaturalist Network works.
Is the iNaturalist Network a federation of iNat instances hosted by the supporting organizations or some other arrangement?
On the Joining the iNaturalist Network page it states “the Network has used localized websites with outreach led by partner organizations active in their country or region. These websites are localized using shared infrastructure that is operated by iNaturalist.” I’m super curious about the details of the shared infrastructure - is it for hosting the rails app, is it a i18n backend, or… ?

Hi ivar, the iNaturalist infrastructure for the network is centralized. The network sites are like skinned portals rather than federated instances.

3 Likes