Still somewhat new to fediverse stuff and trying to learn. Could someone explain this? Thanks!
A “true” copy of a community exists on Beehaw. Lemmy.world makes a copy of that community. They sync back and forth.
When they defederate, the copy on lemmy.world still exists, but it no longer syncs back and forth with the “true” one on Beehaw. So it gets fucky because the “true” one on Beehaw lives on. But if you interact with the community on lemmy.world, you’re only interacting within the copy - so it’s basically a literal echo chamber.
So like, any new posts you see on “Beehaw” (from lemmy.world) are from other lemmy.world users posting to the lemmy.world copy. It’s not syncing with Beehaw, so you’re only interacting with local lemmy.world people, not everyone in the greater Fediverse.
That’s why most Beehaw posts, aside from those made here (locally on lemmy.world), are like 4 days old now.
I hope that makes sense. Also, feel free to correct me if I’m incorrect somewhere.
EDIT: Holy autocorrect, Batman.
Why doesn’t lemmy.world read new posts from beehaw? The local users here wouldn’t be able to send comments back to the beehaw version, but we could at least browse the posts, and even leave comments that other lemmy.world users could read.
just not the way it was originally coded i guess. Keep in mind, the beehaw admins intend to refederate with lemmy.world eventually. They are waiting until the moderator tools get a little better and they can handle the outer world. Last i heard, there was only like 4 mods on the whole instance.
Because beehaw will block sync attempts from lemmy.world. Users can’t directly connect to other instances. The instance they’re on connects with other instances and fetches data in the background.
As far as I know, lemmy.world doesn’t read posts from beehaw.
Instead whenever someone posts on beehaw, beehaw is mean to send a copy to lemmy.world. This allows new content to appear (pretty much) instantly across the entire fediverse without servers asking each other “do you have any new stuff?” thousands of times per second.
Beehaw has stopped sending new posts to lemmy.world, and so they’re not appearing here anymore. I’d guess lemmy.world still does send posts to beehaw - however that instance is ignoring them.
Wait so as I just moved here from Reddit… is lemmy already fracturing so I can’t see stuff on beehaw? Doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose?
I’m so confused by all of this lol. So I can’t see beehaw stuff from lemmyworld? I thought the whole purpose was the ability to see that stuff.
is lemmy already fracturing so I can’t see stuff on beehaw? Doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose?
I’d say it’s both a feature and a bug of the Fediverse!
Everyone is free to start their own server, just as everyone is free to splinter off. This means no central authority deciding what you can see and can’t see.
In the ideal state, there would be multiple servers with the same discussion topic (eg a few “news” communities would exist on beehaw, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml etc). Each of them will slowly take a different direction. This is already kinda happening on reddit (news, worldnews, neutralnews, etc), but here it should happen across servers.
Beehaw is a bit of a weird animal, they don’t like having so many users all at once because it leads to moderation issues. I think they should have just appointed more mods, but they decided on the last-resort option of splintering off temporarily. They really value having a small,close-knit community - they don’t allow people to start their own communities (the subreddit equivalent), downvotes aren’t allowed, etc, so discussion is only focused on a few main channels.
As a new user, i think it’s fine for you to be on lemmyworld! It has the largest variety of content here, although the pace of new content is still slow because lemmy has 1% of 1% of reddit’s userbase. Feel free to contribute!
The takeaway for now is, you can see beehaw posts but can’t really participate. I personally found it useful to block beehaw communities so I can see the activity elsewhere. The current default lemmy sort isn’t very good - I would try sorting by Hot or New.
Thanks for this explanation. I’m starting to understand this a bit more and more. I think once apps become more mature things will become better… I was spoiled by Apollo.
Best to unsubscribe from any Beehaw communities until they refederate. It’s not that things are fracturing, it’s that Beehaw has a certain set of ethos they want to maintain, and the lack of mod tools currently makes that impossible at the moment. There’s no bad blood between the instances.
Yeah i blocked all beehaw communities so they don’t show up for now - not out of bad blood or anything, but just so I don’t accidentally comment in a place where it wont be read.
Beehaw only has a very limited number of communities anyway, so i see this as a good way to build up the equivalent communities (news, tech etc) elsewhere.
More people need to understand this. “Defederate” is a big scary word, and carries the negative connotations of “cutting contact because I don’t want anything to do with you people.” But in this case it’s not that at all, it’s more of a “we’re overgrown and want to prioritize quality over size, so while moderation stuff’s in development, we’re just gonna isolate in our little paradise for a while.” Which is fine. That’s the purpose of decentralisation - the community chooses what to do with itself.
Wanna be a positive, high-quality, highly moderated group kinda separate from the rest? You can do that (beehaw).
Wanna be a bunch of tankies circle jerking over pictures of Stalin? Sure Everyone will defederate from you and call you weird… But you can do that too! (Lemmygrad)
And wanna keep more of the traditional “Reddit” feel from before they got money-crazed and feel apart? Join Lemmy world (even though beehaw keeps their distance for now).
Defederation isn’t a weapon - it’s a tool.
And for me? I’m just sitting here on pawb.social, with reddit’s furry haters finally gone, watching both Lemmy.world and beehaw … And everything else because we don’t defederate much. (Except Lemmygrad. We’ll defederate that. Wouldn’t touch that with a 20 metre pole…)
Long story short, Beehaw is a heavily moderated instance and said that Lemmy didn’t have strong moderation tools yet. So for the time being, they have defederated.
Here’s their rational: https://lemm.ee/post/58240
You can’t see new stuff from beehaw, unless the new stuff is posted by other members of your own instance.
Each instance has its own rules and requirements, and beehaw decided that moderating users from lemmy.world and sh.it.justworks due to the volume of said users is too difficult with the current moderation tools and staff - so they defederated.
This leaves lemmy.world unable to sync with original communities on beehaw, so it can’t update its own copy of the community with new posts and comments. But it also leaves members of beehaw unable to sync with Lemmy.world. - federation is by default enabled or “opt-out”, but in order to federate both instances have to agree to do so, if one suddenly refuses to federate, then no federation happens.
The thing about the fediverse is it allows you to go where you want - my instance (iusearchlinux.fyi) is still federated with both, so I can see both beehaw and Lemmy.world, comment and make posts on both. - if you don’t like who you are federated with or not with, find a new instance.
If you truly want to see “everything”, it’s best to join a small instance that is federated with everybody. I joined an instance called Rammy. It’s nothing special in and of itself, just one guy nice enough to host the server. But I can interact with Beehaw, Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Lemmy NSFW, all of it. So if that’s what you want, join a small instance.
The fediverse was always “fractured”, which is the whole point of it. Beehaw is a heavily moderated and with that censored instance. If you’re not a fan of that, then you just shouldn’t join Beehaw. Lemmy.world is still federated with the majority of instances, so is kbin and a lot of other big instances.
