this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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So when beehaw says they're degenerating from
sh.itjust.worksandlemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw's view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It's identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other's servers. Sincekbin.socialis notsh.itjust.worksorlemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and becausekbin.socialhasn't defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content fromkbin.socialminus any contributions from the defederated servers.It's a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it's used. I think it's a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren't a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it's pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you're on. That said, it's very much a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing; I think that it's fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it's not really an issue.
I also think that as part of a "community taking back the internet from billionaires" movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it'll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of "generally acceptable behaviour" is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same "space" on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.
Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won't matter for any one server if they can't access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from
lemmy.worldorsh.itjust.worksreally want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!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.
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.