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.”
It’s an artifact of how caching and one sided defederation works(beehaw has defederated with lemmy.world, but lemmy.world hasn’t defederated beehaw)
When beehaw defederated, they’ve done two things:
- blocked lemmy.world users from participating in their community
- blocked beehaw users from particpating in lemmy.world
But lemmy.world doesn’t know any of this. So it continues to sync /c/gaming (read access to communities isn’t blocked by defederation) and you’ll see new posts and new comments.
If you try and comment though, it gets weird. Your comment will show up in lemmy.world’s cache of the community, but when it gets sent to beehaw it will be rejected. So now your comment only exists in lemmy.world. Local users will see it, but beehaw won’t and other instances won’t since they’re syncing the ‘real’ copy from beehaw directly.
Beehaw blocked lemmy.world, but lemmy.world didn’t block Beehaw. Therefore, lemmy.world still brings in new posts from Beehaw that you can see. Any comments you make on those posts will not be accepted by Beehaw, whose version of the thread is the “official” version that other instances reference, so your comments will only exist on lemmy.world’s local copy of those posts.
