Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah [...]
No, defederation isn’t shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you’ve been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That’s not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you’re describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it’s still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they’ve been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it’d effectively be a shadowban.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You’ll notice that .world isn’t receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it’s not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world’s list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that’s usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can’t see the screenshots I’ve attached to this comment. I’ve just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you’d like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
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I’ve looked at a few examples, and I’m just super confused now. I’ve also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let’s look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let’s look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can’t see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
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Now lets look at Beehaw’s technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw’s communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it’s not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I’m seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that’s being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it’s not 100% of the content that’s being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
Hrm it seems defederation needs some work put into it. If an instance defederates from another, there should be no way to see each other, one way or another.
For what it’s worth, there is a big problem with Lemmy.world federation. Lots and lots of posts to/from LW and other fully-federated instances take days to show, if at all.
I suspect it’s something to do with their size, but I base that on absolutely nothing.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don’t want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I’ll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That’s a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
I read a post by the Beehaw admins a couple weeks ago saying they were talking to the lemmy.world admin about resolving the issues that caused them to defederate, so it’s possible that they were no longer defederated when the post you found was made. My understanding is that automatic updates only happen when users on one instance are subscribed to the community on the other instance, so refederation might not be obvious. I expect they would have cut the cord again over yesterday’s security breach, though.
That’s pure speculation on my part, though, and quite possibly it was some kind of bug. But I am not particularly tech-savvy, so I tend to wonder about non-technical causes.