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?
It’s two way, beehaw blocks lemmy.world while lemmy.world links beehaw. You can see their posts, but they can’t see yours.
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?
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?
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.
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.
And why did beehaw.org defederate?
I think because of different political view. They’re not allowing content from other instances that might share different opinions.
It was because lemmy.world was experiencing explosive growth and did not have a good mechanism in place to limit spam and troll accounts. This combined with Lemmy’s still infant moderating tools made it difficult for Beehaw to contend with the influx of lemmy.world users who were harassing beehaw users.
A mutual decision was made between both beehaw and lemmy.world to temporarily defederate while the moderation tools are worked on. They fully intend to re-federate once these tools are in place, as both instances have a fairly similar attitude towards harassment and hate speech.
There was no disagreement between the admins of beehaw and lemmy.world
I think it’s also important to understand that defederation is a key feature of the fediverse, not something necessarily bad. It allows us to create interconnected communities that fit the needs of different people.
Beehaw and Lemmy.world have similar goals but different strategies, so they defederate so that Beehaw won’t have to be subject to moderation issues facing Lemmy.world. That’s perfectly fine - Beehaw are not morally obliged to receive content from Lemmy.world. Their users know the content policy of the page, and choose to stay out of their own free will.
Another server might have their own intolerances, even seemingly problematic ones like blasphemy or the letter e. They’re free to defederate as they see fit.
This is not breaking the fediverse - it’s a major feature of the fediverse by design.
Beehaw has very strict moderation, like a traditional forum. They want a small, closed community where they can look out but nobody else can come in. (They’ve even mentioned they would switch to an allowlist if it could be made one-way.)
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had easy sign-ups and Beehaw said the ease of sign-ups were responsible for a lot of trolls and bad actors. So Beehaw defederated from both those instances until they made sign-ups harder.
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?
