this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Out of the loop
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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.
Yea it doesn't seem to be as big a deal as I feared. A week ago it seemed like everyone is trying to dig in within their little islands.
Still, I admit that Beehaw annoys me. Why even choose a platform where the whole point is federation and interoperability, when they just want a corner for themselves? I'd say forums are better for that. As it is it just confuses everybody, especially people who don't know that other instances can't see their comments.
Ed: on the other hand I'm all for preemptively defederating from whatever Facebook cooks up so I'm not as open either I guess