No, defederation isn’t shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you’ve been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That’s not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you’re describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it’s still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they’ve been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it’d effectively be a shadowban.
If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You’ll notice that .world isn’t receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it’s not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world’s list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that’s usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can’t see the screenshots I’ve attached to this comment. I’ve just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you’d like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
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I’ve looked at a few examples, and I’m just super confused now. I’ve also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let’s look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let’s look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can’t see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
