I heard Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world among others, but recently I have been seeing content from beehaw communities and users. Did they re-federate? If so, why? And if not, why am seeing updates from their servers again?
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lemmy.world is still on their blocked instances list, so you might be seeing data pre-defederation. The problem is that it seems you can interact with it but our instance will never be able to relay the content to beehaw (because we are blocked), so it’s like talking to a wall.
Lemmy.world users can still post on beehaw communities but only other lemmy.world users will be able to see and interact with those posts. You’re probably seeing people post on the same beehaw communities that they subbed to either without realizing that they are defederates or not understanding what that means. It will basically always be better now to find somewhere else to post if you want to reach a wider audience now. So instead of using the beehaw gaming community it would be better to use a lemmy.world one for example. That being said, since lemmy.world is the largest instance at the moment, even posting on a beehaw community and only reaching other lemmy.world users who happen to be subscribed to that defederated beehaw community (or who browse all) will still probably reach a wider audience than someone in beehaw posting to other beehaw users for example.
Ok, I understand the logistics of it, but not why they did it. Is there some ideological difference? Are they just introverts?
The Lemmy moderation tools are still in their infancy and the open registration nature of sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world meant that beehaw.org was receiving an unsustainable flow of trolls.
Seems they are helmed by some minister/preacher who wants to protect his flock from the naughties of the internet by way of heavy handed moderation
only other lemmy.world users will be able to see and interact with those posts
What about people from other instances that federate with lemmy.world?
No, they won’t be able to. The way that it works is since lemmy.world is defederated, beehaw won’t give or receive any information about changes made to their instance by lemmy.world users. When a different instance “visits” an outside instance like that they are really just creating a copy of the instance which is where the Lemmy.world users would be posting. Just like lemmy.world, any other instances, even ones we federate with, will create their own copy of beehaw’s instance whenever they visit. The issue is that since we are defederated beehaw doesn’t receive our updates therefore anyone going to beehaw to create their own copy won’t see our updates to that instance either. The post that I linked explains it better I think but that’s the gist anyway. Short answer, no, even if another instance federated with us they won’t see it. They don’t come to us to get the latest version of beehaw’s community, they go to beehaw. And since beehaw doesn’t let us update their version anyone who goes to them won’t receive our updates either.
Ok makes sense. Little internet islands…
For the most part that won’t be the case. They’ll all be interconnected. Beehaw is the only instance that I’m aware of that defederates as aggressively as they do. If you go to the bottom of any instance and click the “instances” link you can see who they have defederated. Most of them will have none or maybe a few defederated at most. Check out beehaw’s and you’ll see what I mean.
For a long time beehaw’s aggressive defederation and moderation policies made a large impact on the feel of Lemmy as a whole since they made up a decent portion of the user base, but now that there is more migration elsewhere like lemmy.world it’s just not as relevant what they do anymore. And with their sign ups being the way they are they will only become more and more irrelevant to the overall feeling of Lemmy. Which isn’t a bad thing for them necessarily. If they only want a small safe space or whatever then they are more than welcome to cultivate that however they want. But I wouldn’t be concerned about defederation on a larger scale where you never know if you’re posting on a defederated instance or not. Like 99% of the time everything will be federated.
Add this level of confusion to the growing list of things I hope Lemmy can handle better in the future. I don’t know the answer, but damn.
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
That post does a better job of explaining in more detail if you want to learn more. It really isn’t so bad once you get a little bit of experience with it.
If an instance is defederated, is there any way Lemmy pings the other instance to let them know, like in the code? I think it might be useful, at least on first thought now, to then maybe hide those communities on the defederated (non “true”) instance. Not unsubscribe on the user end, but maybe not populate when searched, hide in subs list, and don’t show in feeds. A shadow block or something. Then unhide on refederation since none of the posts that happened in between will be back-synced, so to speak. I think that’ll alleviate the confusion. Or it might create more. I don’t know. 😂
I can see where you’re coming from for sure. There is nothing stopping lemmy.world from defederating as well which would clear up any confusion like this at the cost of further restricting its users. It would be nice though to have something like a visual warning or something letting the user know if they are visiting a community that is hosted on an instance which has defederated from their home instance. It could be something as simple as a little icon that if you click on it will link to a page explaining what defederation is or something.
