AgentGoldfish

surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

So there are whitelist only instances (which honestly is what beehaw should be doing), so if you hosted your own instance, you would need to be whitelisted in order to interact with beehaw communities/users. Otherwise, federation is pretty much a default

Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

Ok, so this requires some understanding of the ActivityPub protocol, and my understand of this edge case is admittedly a bit fuzzy. You can still access that information, you could do it right now just by going to https://beehaw.org, and if you have some mechanism to pull that data, you could still get that data if you wanted to. But critically, that wouldn't use ActivityPub.

With ActivityPub, your instance would send a request to the community on beehaw to follow the community. The beehaw instance would then send updates to your instance, where they would be stored as a copy. Beehaw keeps the "true" version, as the community is hosted on their instance, but you have your own copy. If beehaw defederates you (or is whitelist only and never federates you), then you can't send that request (rather, you can send the request, but beehaw won't listen). So beehaw will not send updates via ActivityPub.

sorry, I had to do a lot of editing in order to get it to post this morning.

Including instances that are also defederated.

Basically, beehaw has decided we can no longer access the "true" version of communities on beehaw. So the versions hosted here on lemmy.world are still visible to lemmy.world users, but that doesn't update the "true" version, and also doesn't update other versions hosted on other defederated instances.

It will be interesting to check beehaw communities hosted on defederated instances in a few days. Because the version on lemmy.world will be very different from the version on sh.itjust.works which will be different still from the "true" version.

Maybe read my post on lemmy.world (or another lemmy instance) that all of these are comments on before you make a bunch of assumptions.

You obviously got called out for disregarding the rules of other instances

I obviously didn't. I like how you just assuming I'm some internet asshole. All I did was write out an explanation for the users of this instance because there was a lot of confusion about what defederation means. Maybe stop being a jerk and making assumptions?

I never said beehaw wasn't allowed to do what they're doing, of course they are. You're the one making that assumption. I said that this will result in more damage to beehaw than to lemmy.world, and it will do more damage still to lemmy as a whole.

Like I told the other dude, I don't care what beehaw does. I was just explaining the consequences of this action for the users on this instance. Why are you even here? You aren't in this instance.

I think this action is bad for the adoption of lemmy, that's why I don't like it. Beyond that, the beehaw admins can do what they like. If they want to nuke their walled garden/prison, that's their prerogative. I'm just saying what a bad idea I think it is.

Luckily .world/.ml/.works alternatives are all starting to become available.

Yeah I did. That's why I think they don't fully understand what defederation entails. It doesn't accomplish the goals they set out in their decision post, and does have a whole bunch of knock on effects (for their own users) that they don't address at all.

If lemmy.world wants to be federated to beehaw they should respect the rules of the community they are visiting.

I think your understanding of federation is flawed. Like I wrote in my post, this action does more harm to beehaw than it does to lemmy.world. I don't care about beehaw. For that matter, I don't care about lemmy.world.

I wrote this post to help explain why people could still see posts/comments from beehaw users, in an attempt to explain what was going on. A lot of people were confused as to what defederation means. And given the resulting effects, I think the beehaw admins are similarly confused.

I do care about lemmy, and I don't like that large instance owners are using actions they don't understand. A division like this between 3 of the 4 largest instances can be damaging to the adoption of lemmy as a whole. It would be one thing if this was justified or even made sense, but it didn't.

They're throwing a tantrum because some instances have open registration and they don't like that. They're trying to govern how other instances are run. Like I said, they are using admin tools for moderation purposes, which is not how this is supposed to work. And doing so is could be damaging to lemmy as a whole. Luckily, the beehaw users that like their prison are sticking to it, those that don't are leaving, and the lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users are just not interacting with the beehaw communities.

Lemmy is working as intended. Once again, I don't care what beehaw does. I personally think this is a bad move as it doesn't do what the admins over there want to do. But I'm not personally offended. This whole post was an explanation for the users here who were confused.

That's not at all what's happening though.

Anyone can create an instance. So using your example, it's kind of like reddit banning anyone posting from 4chan, but literally anyone could create their own "chan" to post to reddit. If they only whitelisted instances then that would at least make some sense.

It shouldn’t be beehaw’s job to moderate another instance that just lets everyone in.

But that's exactly what they're trying to do.

I think the admins of Beehaw think they've effectively banned lemmy.world users from their instance, which is largely what they did. And if they chose to do that, then that's their decision. But they didn't choose to do that, they did something far more drastic.

Defederation prevents beehaw users from interacting with lemmy.world users ANYWHERE on lemmy. Effectively, beehaw admins are deciding what their users can see elsewhere on lemmy, which in my view is wrong. Effectively, in order to access most of lemmy, beehaw users will need a second account on another instance. And if you're going to have a second account, why have the first?

The problem is that defederation is not an act of moderators. This is an admin level action being used in service of a moderator level problem. This is not how defederation is meant to be used, and given how the admins of that instance describe their reasoning, I don't think they fully understand the implications of their decision.

1. There are other, less heavy handed ways of accomplishing the same thing

2. This action doesn't actually do what they want it to do, since anyone can create a new instance and post,

3. This action does more to make the experience of their users worse

So yes, admins choosing to defederate another instance despite not understanding what that actually does and what the consequences of that action are is, as I said, dumb.

If that's the point, then there's nothing wrong with what they did.

But like someone else commented, why are they hosting a lemmy instance? What they want is a curated forum...

Yep. It's almost like they didn't fully understand what they were doing...