A) wait, lemmy.world defederated from beehaw? When did that happen??? Is there drama going on that I’m OOTL on?

B) As I understand it, lemmy does not handle orphan communities in a sane manner yet. Thats because federation is naturally asynchronous- when you make a post from instance A into an instance B community, instance A lets you make the post “immediately” from your user perspective, and stores it locally. The actual post may not be sent over to instance B for quite a few minutes until the next scheduled check-in for new content. It’s held in a queue.

Now, As far as lemmy.world is concerned, beehaw is just “temporarily offline” because beehaw is simply ignoring to its requests to sync up. So it holds onto all these “waiting to sync” federated posts locally and never cleans them up. It doesn’t know that beehaw is giving it the cold shoulder. It has no moderators, and does not require them for the community, because it still thinks all valid moderators are on beehaw.

Likely, the lemmy backend is going to need some rewrites to make defederation less of “don’t talk to me shuts door” and more of “don’t talk to me, here’s why, please delete all my communities” just to maintain some semblance of network cohesion. Because these orphan posts across instances will grow to become a huge issue… especially once instances run through their natural life cycle and begin to shut down.