I'm with lemmy.world and I can still see beehaw recent posts and I can interact with them despite us being mutually defederated. How does this actually work?
I thought I read somewhere that other local users can also see your comments?
I wonder if that applies to other federated instances as well. Like if my home instance (lemmygrad.ml) is federated with lemmy.ml, and I make a post on BeeHaw (which is not federated with either), could lemmy.ml users see my comment?
The host instance is responsible for federating (is that a word?) the posts/comments to others. So any comments on lemmy.world to a beehaw community will only show to other lemmy.world users. No one on lemmy.ml would see them.
That explains it thanks. I thought we were mutually defederated (that's what I heard anyway). So essentially, if I were to comment under one of their posts, their users won't see my comment?
your home instance is making a copy of the remote instance.
Comments you make are on the local copy your home instance made.
Your instance tells the remote instance the comments made in your home copy.
Comments in your home copy are written to the remote instance.
Instances now have your comment when they copy the remote instance
Defederation breaks the process at step 3.
So your instance is still copying their remote content, and you can still see and comment on it, but those comments are only in your home instance. They can only be seen from people within your home instance looking at the same copy.
So, the way federation works is via content mirroring, not tunneling. You're not accessing beehaw.org from lemmy.world, you're reading copies of posts published on beehaw.org. When beehaw defederated, they just... Stopped sending new content. That does nothing to the older content that was already sent.
Beehaw has very strict moderation, like a traditional forum. They want a small, closed community where they can look out but nobody else can come in. (They've even mentioned they would switch to an allowlist if it could be made one-way.)
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had easy sign-ups and Beehaw said the ease of sign-ups were responsible for a lot of trolls and bad actors. So Beehaw defederated from both those instances until they made sign-ups harder.
It was because lemmy.world was experiencing explosive growth and did not have a good mechanism in place to limit spam and troll accounts. This combined with Lemmy's still infant moderating tools made it difficult for Beehaw to contend with the influx of lemmy.world users who were harassing beehaw users.
A mutual decision was made between both beehaw and lemmy.world to temporarily defederate while the moderation tools are worked on. They fully intend to re-federate once these tools are in place, as both instances have a fairly similar attitude towards harassment and hate speech.
There was no disagreement between the admins of beehaw and lemmy.world