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/gaming@beehaw.org…
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.”
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.