I’m with lemmy.world and I can still see beehaw recent posts and I can interact with them despite us being mutually defederated. How does this actually work?
You can see the posts, but any interactions are like you talking into the void.
I thought I read somewhere that other local users can also see your comments?
I wonder if that applies to other federated instances as well. Like if my home instance (lemmygrad.ml) is federated with lemmy.ml, and I make a post on BeeHaw (which is not federated with either), could lemmy.ml users see my comment?
They’re not mutually defederated. lemmy.world is pulling from beehaw but not vice versa
That explains it thanks. I thought we were mutually defederated (that’s what I heard anyway). So essentially, if I were to comment under one of their posts, their users won’t see my comment?
From my understanding, in a federated scenario,
- your home instance is making a copy of the remote instance.
- Comments you make are on the local copy your home instance made.
- Your instance tells the remote instance the comments made in your home copy.
- Comments in your home copy are written to the remote instance.
- Instances now have your comment when they copy the remote instance
Defederation breaks the process at step 3.
So your instance is still copying their remote content, and you can still see and comment on it, but those comments are only in your home instance. They can only be seen from people within your home instance looking at the same copy.
Thats how I understand it works, yeah. Beehaw wont pull your comment’s through
But would other instances (including lemmy.world) still see that comment?
So, the way federation works is via content mirroring, not tunneling. You’re not accessing beehaw.org from lemmy.world, you’re reading copies of posts published on beehaw.org. When beehaw defederated, they just… Stopped sending new content. That does nothing to the older content that was already sent.
Your lemmy instance essentially makes a copy of the post, but the copy version can’t sync comments/votes back to the main original version
The problem I see here is between lemmy.ca and Beehaw.org, they are federated both way but out of sync completely, no mirroring, no pull, nothing.