Skip Navigation

How does moderation work for 'false' instance communities following defederation

I hope this is a clear enough description of what I'm asking.

lemmy.world users can still make new posts in @beehaw.org communities, which are only hosted on lemmy.world and there is no indication in the UI that those communities are a 'false' version, only visible to other lemmy.world users

The posts made by lemmy.world users to @beehaw.org communities are not hosted on the 'true' beehaw instance. The 'true' community is moderated by beehaw mods. The 'false' community is moderated by who?

lemmy.world never had moderators for these communities because they were beehaw.org communities.

So who is moderating these posts?

If I had to report a user for breaking community rules, who receives that user report?

Examples of posts in beehaw communities by world users after defederation

https://lemmy.world/post/172609

https://lemmy.world/post/167045

https://lemmy.world/post/158352

https://lemmy.world/post/185750

https://lemmy.world/post/162320

8

You're viewing a single thread.

8 comments
  • 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.

8 comments