How does moderation of defederated communities work?
I still see posts from other instances on beehaw communities, and it makes me wonder: If those posts can't be seen by the mods, then is there simply no moderation possible for them (other than the instance owner, I guess)?
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You're seeing a cached version of the post from before defederation. Those comments only exist on your instance and the post will drop off your feed soon enough.
Let me see if I understand this correctly:
If there's community C from instance A, and it's visible to instance B, then there's a "view" of C@A that B users can see. We can say that B "sees" C@A; when B users "look for" C@A they see this view of it.
So long as A and B federate, those stay in sync, and the moderators of C@A can control what B users see when they look for C@A.
But if A and B stop federating, then the view of C@A from B becomes decoupled from the view of C@A from A.
And this stops the A moderators from having any effect on posts to (the B view of) C@A from B.
Users on B still see C@A, but their view is onto an unmoderated C@A that only contains traffic from B.
So, any community that is seen and then defederated, becomes an unmoderated space on the seeing instance.
Am I missing something? That seems like a pretty bad bug.
Kind of...
So lets say there is a group called Group A on Instance A. And there is a user called User B on Instance B that is subscribed to Group A.
Then Instance A defederates from instance B. At this point, instance B still has cached copies of the stuff that happened in Group A before defederation. However, they won't see any new content, and crucially, even though they can still see a cached version of Group A, if they try and post to it from Instance B, won't be boosted/relayed/propagated by Group A, so no one else will see their content.
Edit - The exception might be that other users on Instance B that were users of Group A, may see new content generated by Instance B users, though I'm not sure if that's the case
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. The people on instance B who look at the "C@A" community can still post; their posts won't propagate to other instances but they will see each other's messages, but nobody but the instance B admin will be able to moderate those messages.
IRC and Usenet both have had similar situations.
That's not a bug though, that's just how federation works
It's a corner case that could maybe be handled differently in ways that wouldn't have the surprising consequence, though.
B can defederate from A if it wants to prevent these bastard communities.