What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It’s going to happen again and again, there’s no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can’t communicate directly? We’re going to find out.
It was an issue in Mastodon originally too, but Mastodon added more flexibility to the platform and the nuke option wasn’t the only option.