this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Hi,
New here and still learning the ropes. With lemmyworld being defedrated and the way activitypub works, can I still post to, interact with(up vote, down vote) and subscribe to instances originating from beehaw? Or would being federated put all people who log in from lemmy.world on a block list from interacting with the communities and only being able to view?
Cheers.
None of the content from beehaw.org would update on lemmy.world, so if you (a lemmy.world user) subscribed to a beehaw community, no posts would ever be sent unless beehaw refederated lemmy.world. Essentially beehaw's server is not talking to lemmy.world in any way currently
Is that right? I thought federation was a two-way street. Lemmy.world hasn’t defederated beehaw, so wouldn’t posts from there still be visible? Lemmy.world users would be able to comment, but none of their comments would be visible to beehaw users, no…?
This is correct as far as I understand. Content from Beehaw can appear on other instances still federated to it, but content from those instances will not make its way back to users that are viewing the community from Beehaw.
To further what rideranton said, the way federation works is by mirroring content across different websites. You're interacting with copies of posts and comments that have been sent to lemmy.world, and when you reply to someone, or post in a remote community, all of that is happening locally. You're exclusively engaging with the local copy of everything.
When sites are federated, they then sync up their content. If they defederate, that syncing merely stops occurring.
Let's say there are five websites all federating, A, B, C, D, and E. There's a popular community, Junk, on B that people on all 5 websites use. This means all 5 sites house a local copy of Junk, and whenever someone posts to Junk their local site pushes those posts out to the other 4.
But one day, B defederates from A, because they decide that there are too many assholes on A. Now, anything people on B post to Junk just never reach A, and similarly anything people on B post to Junk never gets sent to A. But A is still communicating with C, D, and E. Their updates still flow out to those 3 other websites, and updates form them continue to flow back. Similarly, B is still in communication with C, D, and E, so they stay in sync as well. And really, from sites C, D, and E, it kind of looks like nothing happened (though if people pay close enough attention, they may notice that people from A never comment on posts from people using B, and vice versa).
Now, users on A may still be able to see posts and comments from users on B if they arrive on A via C, D, or E, but it won't work the other way: Because site B has explicitly blocked traffic from site A, any content whose author is on site A will be filtered out when syncing with C, D, or E.
That makes it a lot easier to understand. I was confused on how messages propagated. Your last paragraph is what cleared it up for me. Won't this lead to strange comment chains? You could have a hundred different people commenting on a chain and they're all a mix of federated and Def federated instances. Some will see some comments and others will see other comments but none will see all the comments unless they're completely federated with all the sites. This is where it loses me. Not that I don't understand what's happening, it's I don't understand how it's supposed to work in a threaded environment. I guess once I start seeing in an action I'll get a better grasp of it. I don't think this is going to work out as well as it was intended to.
Cheers.
It absolutely can lead to odd comment chains, depending on how filtering is handled. I'm not sure how either Lemmy or kbin do that, though. The easy solution is for site B to filter out posts or comments from site A, and every comment that follows in the chain.
The defederation shouldn't affect users of kbin.social in any way, beehaw isn't defedarating from this instance.