cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/652870
Using Beehaw’s /c/gaming community as an example: Can someone please explain why I am still able to view this community and even see new posts? I also saw a few posts from beehaw users themselves in the last day. According to the explanation from the admins, I should be able to see posts in /c/gaming ONLY from other lemmy.world users, however that does not appear to be the case. I am seeing content from other instances, including beehaw. Can someone explain?
I read the explanation for defederation like 20 times and I still don’t understand. It is incredibly confusing so if someone could explain this properly, that would be great. Thanks!
The thing I’m confused about is whether or not we should be seeing posts from anyone on /c/gaming @beehaw.org (as an example) that’s not from lemmy.world. Does that make sense? According to the admin’s post here, we shouldn’t, however I am still seeing a few posts that look new. Is this due to the caching issues? Because I’m definitely not seeing ALL of the new posts, just a handful. This is what i cannot seem to get a straight answer on. The below says no, however I definitely am 100% seeing posts from non-lemmy.world users on /c/[email protected]…
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
“This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities. Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.”
I thought you should see lemmy.world users as well as users that are federating to lemmy.world.
The admin post makes it sound like we should ONLY see lemmy.world users, since the ‘original’ is located on beehaw, and beehaw has defederated us.
I think it’s the other way around. Because Beehaw defederated from us, they can’t see our content or replies, but since we didn’t defederate from them, we can still see their content and reply to it, but it is only visible to ourselves and other instances that are federated with both us and Beehaw. Defederation allows an instance to censor content within their instance, but it doesn’t necessarily block their content from other instances unless it is a two way defederation.
I believe this is designed this way to give instances the ability to shield themselves from bad actors while also allowing other instances to benefit from the maximum amount of content.
They have talked about changes in the future to make it easier to know when other users won’t see your post due to defederation, but they haven’t had enough time to implement those changes yet. The current Lemmy dev team is pretty much just two dudes.
Oh thank god, I was worried sick that the Fediverse might be doomed!
Thanks for the insight! What I’m wondering now though:
What happens to all the replies “downstream” of content that is not visible? Will users of c/beehaw not see those either, even if they’re from users of instances they’re federated with?
I think the whole defederation thing is extremely unclear snd confusing. I think better documentation needs to be made to clearly show what we will and will not see when defederated by another instance. I don’t think it’s clear at all. I’ve asked this question like 10 times and received 10 different answers
That is exactly the sort of thing they are currently working on, but Lemmy has grown by 1600% in the last month alone, so explanations are taking a back seat to improvements at the moment. This was addressed directly in a stickied post on Lemmy.ml a few weeks ago—they simply don’t have enough manpower to be focusing on upgrades full time while also trying to answer every question in the threads, so they’re focusing on stability and upgrades for now, and intend to have much better informational resources after the dust settles.
We would all benefit from being patient. There are only 2 primary devs on the Lemmy team, and we would be in bad shape if we burn them out with high expectations.