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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s two way, beehaw blocks lemmy.world while lemmy.world links beehaw. You can see their posts, but they can’t see yours.
