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Pistcow ,

no

Pratai ,

Dude… just go back to Reddit. You’ll be happier there.

gabe ,

Imagine the fediverse like a bunch of buildings on a street with each instance having its own giant delivery crew that is constantly working. Every time a post is made, the delivery crew is sent to other connected instances to inform them of that post. Defederation is like placing a bouncer in front of your building that automatically checks the ID of each delivery crew thats trying to enter the home instances building. If an instance it has defederated from tries to send over any of its delivery crew, they are immediately stopped by the bouncer and thrown into the trash.

Obviously it’s more complicated than that with tons of actions and things that go on across the fediverse, but the basic principle is there. It’s like placing a “do not enter” sign.

anon6789 ,

A, B, and C are federated. They can all see each other’s posts.

New group D shows up. A, B, C, and D all start off seeing each other.

D starts posting anti-pastafarian comments. A and B are pro-pastafarian, and defederate from D.

A and B still see C posts, but now no longer see content from D. I forget if that goes both ways or not.

C thinks they should hear D out and don’t defederate, so C still sees everybody.

That’s my basic understanding at least. Politely correct me if I’m mistaken!

gabe ,

On lemmy it’s only if the blocks are mutual, but it varies. It’s bizarrely complicated in the way that lemmy handles it.

cerement ,
@cerement@slrpnk.net avatar

It’s bizarrely complicated in the way that lemmy handles it

D gets to look over the fence and see how much fun A and B are having without them and regrets their antipasto attitude?

yeah, I don’t know – personally think a ostracism metaphor would be a better match for federation – once A defederates from D, not only do they block anything incoming from D but they also don’t send anything out to D – D has to patch together posts from thirdhand federations …

mp3 ,
@mp3@lemmy.ca avatar

Let’s start with what a federated system means.

A federated system consists of multiple instances (ie: lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, feddit.de, etc) that are able to communicate between eachothers using a standard communication protocol (in this case ActivityPub). This mean that each users in all of those federated instances are able to see and interact with eachothers by posting, commenting, and subscribing to local and remote communities.

Think of it like the email system. You’re able to get an email account with Gmail, but that doesn’t limit you from sending emails to users at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

Let’s say you’re on Lemmy.ml (which is an instance) and there’s another instance (example.com) with users that are consistently disrupting the communities in your local instance. The instance admin reach out to the other instance admins, asking them to get their users to follow the rules of the local communities and the instance, but despite banning these users and removing posts and comments, the situation persists. The instance admin may decide to push the nuclear button, and deny the unruly instance from being able to communicate with it. This makes all communications between these two instances impossible, and all posts, comments and user content that was synced will remain visible (unless the instance admin does a cleanup), but all new content from that instance will basically never show up.

LinkOpensChest_wav ,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.one avatar

The email analogy really made it click for me. And to extend the analogy, I think of platforms like Mastodon and Kbin like SMS. They can fully communicate with Lemmy, but with some minor idiosyncrasies.

boooooboo ,

IIRC in mastodon if the other instance deletes itself, all links to it in other instances will also get nuked. Is that also the case for lemmy?

cobysev ,

Let’s start with what a federated system means.

I’m gonna take a step back and introduce a more commonly heard/understood term. According to Merriam-Webster, a FEDERATION is:

  1. an encompassing political or societal entity formed by uniting smaller or more localized entities: such as

a. a federal government

b. a union of organizations

Definition 1b. best sums up a federated system in the sense of OP’s question. It’s a collection of smaller independent organizations united for a particular cause. In the case of Lemmy and other federated sites, sharing digital information. No single federated site controls all of the “fediverse,” yet they can all technically communicate with each other as if they’re one entity.

Defederated, on the other hand, is just the opposite. A single centralized organization with complete control over the content they provide. Reddit, being one corporation that has complete control over all content on their own servers, is a defederated site.

Antiwork ,

When you fart and they piss and then someone else flushes the toilet regardless if you were finished.

favrion OP ,
@favrion@lemmy.ml avatar

I have more questions now. lol

match ,
@match@pawb.social avatar

my friends stopped talking to each other but they both still talk to me but they have each other blocked in the group chat so it’s like each of them never sees the other but I personally can see both of them

Early_To_Risa ,

This should be upvoted as the most concise and simple explanation in this comment section.

favrion OP ,
@favrion@lemmy.ml avatar

Phenomenal.

Extrasvhx9he ,

God this is so simple I love it

edythecullen ,
@edythecullen@lemmy.world avatar

Well done. 👍

Xtallll ,
@Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Every community lives on its instance(server).

When you browse your Local feed it only shows communities that live on the same instance you made your account on.

For federation: When you want to see a community on a different instance your instance will download a copy of the community from it’s home instance. Then if you make a change, like an upvote or a comment your community makes the change on its local copy, then it sends a copy of the change to the original community.

When two instances are defederated they stop sending or receiving updates from each others communities.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Let’s say Andy is on the Andy-instance, Beth is on the Beth-instance, and Charlie is on the Charlie-instance. The Charlie-instance has a community called Something-Cool, and all three people are subscribed to it. Beth makes a new post in Something-Cool. The “real” version of the post is on Charlie-instance because that’s where the community is, but the Lemmy software on Andy-instance and Beth-instance makes a copy of the post locally. Andy comments on the post, which happens on his local instance, but the software synchs up his comment with the “real” version of the post on Charlie-instance.

Now let’s say that Andy-instance defederates from Charlie-instance. That means that the copying and syncing no longer happen between those two instances. There’s already a copy of Beth’s post on Andy-instance, and that doesn’t get removed, but if anyone else comments on that post, Andy will never see it because his instance isn’t connected to the “real” version. He could make another comment on the post, because it’s still on his instance, but his comment won’t get synced to the “real” version, so it will never get synced to any other instances either, because they always take from the “real” version. Other people on Andy-instance will see Andy’s new comment because it’s on their home instance.

favrion OP ,
@favrion@lemmy.ml avatar

Ghost commenting. Quirky stuff.

autumn ,

Everyone is part of the server they signed up with. Federation allows everyone to see each other’s posts, filtered through your own server.

If another server defederates yours, their users essentially can’t see your (new) comments/posts. But you can see most of theirs.

It is not necessarily a 2 way street. Continuing the example, your server can choose whether or not to defederate back. If it does defederate, you’ll no longer see any new comments/posts from the other server.

A much better, longer post about this can be seen here.

And another one here

Xylight ,
@Xylight@lemmy.xylight.dev avatar

Instances 1 2 and 3 are all connected/federated. When a post is made on 3, 3 will tell 1 and 2 “hey, I made a post.”.

1 and 2 will reply: “ok, I saved it in my DB.”

Let’s say 2 decides to defederate 3. When 3 says that they made a post:

1 will say: “okay, saved it.”

2 will ignore it.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Ya have two school clubs, people in those clubs talk. If those clubs “defederate”, you can still talk to people in your club, but you can’t talk to people in the other club.

squiblet , (edited )
@squiblet@kbin.social avatar

You sign up and use Lemmy from a certain server, known as an instance, which means a server running Lemmy. Each Lemmy server has its own content, which means what people on that server do, but also it shows stuff from “federated” servers, which means other Lemmies.

By default every Lemmy shows stuff from every other Lemmy. But each Lemmy can choose to “defederate” specific other servers, which means to not communicate with them and therefore not show posts, comments, replies, up/down votes or communities from that defederated server.

So, defederation means to blacklist a server. It only affects people who have accounts on the server that chose to defederate.

luthis ,

It is when you throw a person through a window. I think it has to be deliberate, like, you can’t accidentally fall out a window and be defenestrated.

Fondots ,

Let’s imagine there are 3 magic books, and what someone writes/draws/glues onto the pages of one of them appears in all 3 simultaneously. You can use them to share stories, articles, pictures, have conversations, etc. Those 3 books are federated.

If one of those books gets lost, stolen, damaged, etc. everything still exists in those other 2 books and they can keep talking to each other. and if/when the lost book is found or repaired, it will get backups of everything from the other 2 books.

Now let’s say the owner of books 1 and 3 have a falling out, and they break the spell federating their books together, but each of them remain federated with book 2.

Books 1 and 3 can no longer see what the other is writing in their book, but everything they already wrote is still there, and they can still see what 2 is doing, and for anyone using book 2 nothing much has changed, except that they no longer see 1 and 3 getting into arguments with each other in the pages.

The books are the different Lemmy instances, anything anything written, drawn, or glued onto the pages are all of the comments, posts, up/downvotes, etc. One of the books getting lost or damaged is when that server goes down for any of the various reasons servers go down.

And of course instead of magic, it’s the internet and programming and such.

takeda ,

Federation is like instead of having single reddit you would have many different reddits under different domains, they have their own subreddits. You don't need to create separate account on every reddit, you can theoretically access those subreddits from any of those reddit servers.

Now, defederation is breaking that. If there's reddit-A and reddit-B, you have account on reddit-A and they both de-federated, you won't be able to access subreddits from reddit-B.

I think one of lemmy servers that defederates the most is perhaps beehaw.org. Their goal is to create welcoming space accepting everyone. So they defederated from servers that they believe is ruining that experience, either because admins of those servers are not proactive, or outright support stances that beehaw.org does not tolerate.

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