I heard Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world among others, but recently I have been seeing content from beehaw communities and users. Did they re-federate? If so, why? And if not, why am seeing updates from their servers again?
Lemmy.world users can still post on beehaw communities but only other lemmy.world users will be able to see and interact with those posts. You’re probably seeing people post on the same beehaw communities that they subbed to either without realizing that they are defederates or not understanding what that means. It will basically always be better now to find somewhere else to post if you want to reach a wider audience now. So instead of using the beehaw gaming community it would be better to use a lemmy.world one for example. That being said, since lemmy.world is the largest instance at the moment, even posting on a beehaw community and only reaching other lemmy.world users who happen to be subscribed to that defederated beehaw community (or who browse all) will still probably reach a wider audience than someone in beehaw posting to other beehaw users for example.
Add this level of confusion to the growing list of things I hope Lemmy can handle better in the future. I don’t know the answer, but damn.
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
That post does a better job of explaining in more detail if you want to learn more. It really isn’t so bad once you get a little bit of experience with it.
If an instance is defederated, is there any way Lemmy pings the other instance to let them know, like in the code? I think it might be useful, at least on first thought now, to then maybe hide those communities on the defederated (non “true”) instance. Not unsubscribe on the user end, but maybe not populate when searched, hide in subs list, and don’t show in feeds. A shadow block or something. Then unhide on refederation since none of the posts that happened in between will be back-synced, so to speak. I think that’ll alleviate the confusion. Or it might create more. I don’t know. 😂
Ok, I understand the logistics of it, but not why they did it. Is there some ideological difference? Are they just introverts?
The Lemmy moderation tools are still in their infancy and the open registration nature of sh.itsjust.works and lemmy.world meant that beehaw.org was receiving an unsustainable flow of trolls.
only other lemmy.world users will be able to see and interact with those posts
What about people from other instances that federate with lemmy.world?
No, they won’t be able to. The way that it works is since lemmy.world is defederated, beehaw won’t give or receive any information about changes made to their instance by lemmy.world users. When a different instance “visits” an outside instance like that they are really just creating a copy of the instance which is where the Lemmy.world users would be posting. Just like lemmy.world, any other instances, even ones we federate with, will create their own copy of beehaw’s instance whenever they visit. The issue is that since we are defederated beehaw doesn’t receive our updates therefore anyone going to beehaw to create their own copy won’t see our updates to that instance either. The post that I linked explains it better I think but that’s the gist anyway. Short answer, no, even if another instance federated with us they won’t see it. They don’t come to us to get the latest version of beehaw’s community, they go to beehaw. And since beehaw doesn’t let us update their version anyone who goes to them won’t receive our updates either.