what does it mean that Beehaw "defederated" from lemmy.world?

Dick Justice@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 171 points –

I thought I understood, but I still have Beehaw content in my feed, so I guess I don't understand after all... Can someone dumb it down for me?

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Suppose there was a comment thread containing a back-and-forth conversation between a kbin.social user and a lemmy.world user. What would a user on beehaw.org see, given that they are federated with one but not the other?

AFAIK, it depends on where this community originated in which this conversation happens.

  • If it's a beehaw community: lemmy.world users can only talk to other lemmy.world users
  • If it's a lemmy.world community: beehaw users can only talk to other beehaw users
  • If it is hosted anywhere else: I give up, I cannot make sense of it.

Please notify me if someone knows the answer. I tried to understand it using this great explanation with examples.

I also wonder what would technically happen if beehaw users could not see comments from defederated instances in other instances. How would they see a back and forth? Would they see the same level of indentation? Would they see other users from federated instances replying to comments which do not exist?

Users on Beehaw would not see anything from Lemmy.world. If it's still federated with Kbin, then they would see that content.

Likewise, anyone on Lemmy.world would not see content or be able to access communities from Beehaw.

So for a Beehaw user, would they see all of the the Kbinner's comments and it would look as if they were talking to themselves? Or would they only see the top level Kbinner comment and nothing else (due to their instance not seeing the Beehaw comment and therefore not seeing children of that comment either)?

Beehaw can pull in content from other instances, but users from those instances cannot comment or post back to Beehaw. If you were interacting with content coming from Beehaw on a different instance, in practice it would feel like you're shadow-banned as nobody on Beehaw would be able to see or reply to you.

So given participant 1, 2. 1 is on .world, 2 is on kbin

P1: message a
P2: message b
P1: message c
P2: message d

Would a beehaw user see just messages b and d? What would it look like they are replying to?

Would they see the comment chain at all as it was started by P1?

There's two different scenarios, a community not hosted on beehaw:

they wouldn't see the chain at all.

On a community hosted on beehaw:

Message a would only exist on world's local copy of the thread, nobody not on world can see it. (This local copy is also not getting updated by anyone not on world.)

Basically, the true thread exists on the instance that hosts the community. Defederation cuts off communication with one server. If it's the server that hosts it, it's a lot more severe.