I still see posts from other instances on beehaw communities, and it makes me wonder: If those posts can’t be seen by the mods, then is there simply no moderation possible for them (other than the instance owner, I guess)?

  • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Let me see if I understand this correctly:

    If there’s community C from instance A, and it’s visible to instance B, then there’s a “view” of C@A that B users can see. We can say that B “sees” C@A; when B users “look for” C@A they see this view of it.

    So long as A and B federate, those stay in sync, and the moderators of C@A can control what B users see when they look for C@A.

    But if A and B stop federating, then the view of C@A from B becomes decoupled from the view of C@A from A.

    And this stops the A moderators from having any effect on posts to (the B view of) C@A from B.

    Users on B still see C@A, but their view is onto an unmoderated C@A that only contains traffic from B.

    So, any community that is seen and then defederated, becomes an unmoderated space on the seeing instance.

    Am I missing something? That seems like a pretty bad bug.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Am I missing something?

      Kind of…

      So lets say there is a group called Group A on Instance A. And there is a user called User B on Instance B that is subscribed to Group A.

      Then Instance A defederates from instance B. At this point, instance B still has cached copies of the stuff that happened in Group A before defederation. However, they won’t see any new content, and crucially, even though they can still see a cached version of Group A, if they try and post to it from Instance B, won’t be boosted/relayed/propagated by Group A, so no one else will see their content.

      Edit - The exception might be that other users on Instance B that were users of Group A, may see new content generated by Instance B users, though I’m not sure if that’s the case

      • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. The people on instance B who look at the “C@A” community can still post; their posts won’t propagate to other instances but they will see each other’s messages, but nobody but the instance B admin will be able to moderate those messages.

        IRC and Usenet both have had similar situations.