this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Federation can be a one way street. The problem with that is your comments and votes will only be visible from the instance you did it from. Lemmy.world will show other Lemmy.world users your comment but Beehaw will not ever see it, which means your comment will not proliferate to other instances either.
You can still browse content from an instance that has defederated yours but your actions will only be visible on your own instance.
This is a big roadblock for lemmy. There needs to be a clear indication that an instance is defederated from the community you're posting to and that doesn't currently exist.
A instance can make a decision thst it's users aren't aware of without some kind of marker.
unfortunately it's not as easy as that. defederation isn't meant to be fun. but a last resort. for example if people do illegal stuff on one instance, you want to defederate them WITHOUT having their link and instance name kept around everywhere. But you're right. We still need a good technical solution for that.
You can't stop a user from cross instance subscribing, so if a lemmy.ml user subscribes to ! Antisemitic@bob's-racist-emporium.lemmy.wtf before it's defederated, it should be immediately clear if posting across instances will have no effect to the posting user.
A real world for instance is that I have a subscribe pending to [email protected] thst is either stuck or not being accepted. I've made posts before realizing that lemmy.ml is not federating with that instance and had no idea so I've been contributing to the ether.
Sure. Didn't know this happens. I'd consider this an UI issue and i hope someone files a bug report. If you're explicitly trying to subscribe, or you're already subscribed, you need to get an error message if the software does anything unexpected (ie silently dropping messages).
The instances that are federated with one another I believe are publicly listed, somewhere. From there it would be fairly straightforward to create a tool that tells you whether your instance is "compatible" with the one you're interacting with.
Anyone good at coding? Sounds like a project. Make one and add it to the list that I'm sure is also out there somewhere. If there are such useful things, they should be added to all the sidebars and made common knowledge.
Does this mean that only beehaw will not be able to see your interactions but every other instance would still be able to?
Think of instances a bit like mail centers.
When you are federated with an instance, they will deliver their mail to you. You are also able write to any of their communities, who will deliver that mail to other instances that they're in business with.
But when an instance defederates from yours, they're no longer delivering mail to and from you. When you look at one of their communities, you effectively have a mailbox, still with the carrier's logo, but nothing is coming or going anymore. What you're left with is all of the old mail that was there before they canceled your route, along with new letters being written by people on your side that will never be delivered.
From the perspective of the other instance, however, they've torn out your mailbox entirely. It effectively doesn't exist.
The more complicated part is what happens when users from these two instances visit a third who they are both federated with. That third instance will accept my mail, and share it to everyone else. But the instance that defederated from me will not accept any of my mail, even when it's routed through the other instance.
But defederation is a one-sided block (unless both instances defederates from each other), so the third instance will still send me comments/posts from people on the instance that defederated from mine. But if I try to reply to them on that third instance, they'll never see it because they aren't taking any of my mail.
No, the host instance will not proliferate your input to other instances. Only your instance will have that and will only share it with other users from your instance.
e.g. I'm on Lemmy.world. I post on the Beehaw gaming community. Only other users from Lemmy.world will see my posts.
Everything you post in a beehaw community won’t be seen by anyone else. Everything you post in a community of any other instance will be seen by everyone who isn’t on an instance that defederated yours
That's a very interesting setup. Seems kinda weird that it wouldn't just block anything coming from the defederated instance.
But it does.
Example: You're on lemmy.world. Let's say lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml today.
Now you won't be able to see any new posts made by users of lemmy.ml, be it on lemmy.ml itself or on any other instance. You will still see everything that was posted up until the defederation though because defederation just means that your instance won't request new copies of the content of lemmy.ml .
And they also can't post stuff on comunities of lemmy.world(I believe they technically could do that, just that nobody could see it, but it may be that by now it's entirely blocked to even make a post there).
Now as long as lemmy.ml doesn't defederate lemmy.world too, their users will still be able to see your comments and may also reply to your comments on other instances, but you won't see that.
So defederation mainly serves two purposes for the users of the instance that defederates another instance: