• OpenStars@startrek.website
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    4 hours ago

    @Blaze@reddthat.com Do you know why people on startrek.website cannot see certain communities on e.g. hexbear.net?

    I did not think it was even possible to block specific communities from an instance. I thought what Farid might be referring to is a change where some communities are allowed to be set to “local-only”, so that only those with an account specifically from that instance can make posts there. Then again, https://hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse says that its Visibility is set to “Public” (even though I thought they said that they looked forward to changing it - did that never happen?).

    Various methods of linking that I’ve tried - explained in this guide post (btw @abfarid@startrek.website that is a neat community to subscribe to!:-) - such as https://startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net does not work for me, and the bang syntax never auto-completes it? Even this kind of searching https://startrek.website/search?q=!chapotraphouse&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll for the community name does not work either (despite ChapoTrapHouse specifically saying that it should in its sidebar), nor clicking Communities, select All rather than Local, and type e.g. “chapo”. So it is not merely that nobody has subscribed yet - this instance seems somehow to really not be aware of that community?

    Perhaps this is a (new?) style of “partial defederation”, where not the users but the communities on an instance are excluded. But that cannot be right either, b/c e.g. https://startrek.website/c/Technology@hexbear.net works (it has no visible posts, though that is normal behavior whenever nobody has ever subscribed to it before from a particular instance, in this case star trek, but if one of us subscribed then roughly a day later the posts should be there - for comparison, https://startrek.website/c/Technology@lemmy.world also works and shows the posts). Though neither https://startrek.website/c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net nor https://startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net work. So some communities on hexbear.net seem to be selectively excluded from federation on startrek.website.

    To be clear I am not complaining - this is actually a helpful protection against users going into those unawares, as in: if they refuse to mark their communities as local then they should not be surprised when others make that choice for them - though I am curious.:-)

      • OpenStars@startrek.website
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        12 minutes ago

        Oh that’s fascinating. Again I did not even know that was possible - it looks like someone, but a mod, NOT an admin? - removed it a month ago, then 13 days ago unremoved it and then removed it again. These must be some new features involving the mod user tools from 0.19.5, bc I thought that previously that was not possible.

        Also, the mod log may not be telling the full truth there - bc who would such a “mod” be, like how could there be a mod of Chapotraphouse of hexbear.net from startrek.website? - it does seem rather something that only an admin should be able to do. The totalitarian Lemmy.ml devs routinely hide stuff from the modlog though so it makes sense that this too is merely what it says but not what happened.

        It looks like you’d have to talk to the Star Trek admins to find out more.

        The main page sidebar says they are at a Mastodon instance though.