this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
109 points (93.6% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1244 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.