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ELI5: Why can't defederation be one sided? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I think I understand how the federation system works currently and I'm not sure if I think this is a good thing, but why does federation require the entire link between communities to be broken?

Like say that Community A wants to block out Community B. That's fine, but can Community B still see posts on A? And if not, why not?

And to go further, if I'm part of Community A and I still want to interact with Community B, why can't I? Like is there a reason for forcing users to only interact with communities that are federated?

Again, I understand there are restrictions with data and how things currently work. I'm just asking from an abstract perspective about the fundamental ideas.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is technically one-sided, and it works at the instance level, not the community level. If instance (server) A adds instance B to their defederated list: instance A ignores everything from instance B and does not send any updates to instance B. Instance B doesn't have to add instance A to it's defederation list, but it doesn't matter because it doesn't make a difference to what instance A is doing.