Question about Defederation that I am stuck on

SlowNPC, 11 months ago

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.

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago

That makes sense. I thought the explanation said that we wouldn't receive any new content from beehaw.org. I didn't realize it only applied to comments. I could have sworn it said no new posts as well?

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago

https://lemmy.world/comment/538560

This comment seems to directly contradict what you said. Am I missing something? Is this person wrong?

ipha, 11 months ago

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:

1. blocked lemmy.world users from participating in their community
2. 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.

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago

https://lemmy.world/comment/538560

This comment seems to directly contradict what you said. Am I missing something? Is this person wrong?

czech, 11 months ago

The comment you linked to is provably wrong per your post. You can test whether the alternate theory is correct by posting on beehaw from your Lemmy.world account and then viewing the thread from beehaw (just don't login if you don't have an account).

Let us know how it goes.

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago

The thing I'm confused about is whether or not we should be seeing posts from anyone on /c/gaming 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."

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Ah ok this checks out. So as a Lemmy.World user, I am still going to see all of the new posts in those communities. I just can't comment? I could have sworn that the documentation stated that we wouldn't be receiving any new content (posts/comments) from Beehaw. So you are saying it is just a read-only? It does seem that we aren't picking up all of the new posts from /c/gaming@beehaw.org. If you actually go to beehaw.org, there are way more new posts. Do you know why this is? There are also comments on the beehaw version but not the lemmy.world version. Aren't you saying we should be seeing comments?

ipha, 11 months ago

That may be related to our general issues with federation. Things aren't always syncing properly -- see here for more known issues: https://lemmy.world/post/15786

FeelzGoodMan420, 11 months ago

Got it. Thanks. I think I have a much better understanding now. That was very helpful. Hopefully this defederation nonsense works itself out as people spread out into their preferred instances/communities. It is a shame about Beehaw since they have some of the "currently" largest communities, such as /c/gaming. I assume people will just migrate to another one.