Asklemmy

First off, this is the wrong sub for this question. See the sidebar, but this is a kind of random discussion sub for lemmings, similar to /r/AskReddit/. The Lemmy or lemmysupport communities would be better locations, as would the meta community on lemmy.world... which is called lemmyworld (and unfortunately has lots of off-topic junk in it right now). But your question is an important one, so I'll weigh in here.

I'm not 100% certain, but I expect these zombie communities are unmoderated. The right thing to do would be for reports to go to instance-admins, but I'd be surprised if Lemmy covered this edge case correctly right now. I think there's a decent chance you may have to at-mention or DM an instance admin to get posts/comments in these orphaned communities addressed, and also that admins on affected servers should consider purging them to address this issue of lack of moderation.

This is one more example of how this split increases moderation load network-wide, and how Beehaw is offloading the costs of their unsustainable moderation policies to others.

A) wait, lemmy.world defederated from beehaw? When did that happen??? Is there drama going on that I'm OOTL on?

B) As I understand it, lemmy does not handle orphan communities in a sane manner yet. Thats because federation is naturally asynchronous- when you make a post from instance A into an instance B community, instance A lets you make the post "immediately" from your user perspective, and stores it locally. The actual post may not be sent over to instance B for quite a few minutes until the next scheduled check-in for new content. It's held in a queue.

Now, As far as lemmy.world is concerned, beehaw is just "temporarily offline" because beehaw is simply ignoring to its requests to sync up. So it holds onto all these "waiting to sync" federated posts locally and never cleans them up. It doesn't know that beehaw is giving it the cold shoulder. It has no moderators, and does not require them for the community, because it still thinks all valid moderators are on beehaw.

Likely, the lemmy backend is going to need some rewrites to make defederation less of "don't talk to me shuts door" and more of "don't talk to me, here's why, please delete all my communities" just to maintain some semblance of network cohesion. Because these orphan posts across instances will grow to become a huge issue... especially once instances run through their natural life cycle and begin to shut down.

This Beehaw/Lemmy.World issue is seriously making me lose faith in Lemmy as a platform. I don't see how Lemmy can grow when server admins have the ability to basically nuke other servers and ruin the experience for everyone on that server, without those users even realizing what's going on. I don't know what the solution is, but this seems like a major problem.

Answered here: https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/10130