this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Can someone ELI5 what happens when another instance defederate us? None of those are my main instance, so nothing has changed on my end with them...
Basically they stop receiving or responding to updates from your instance. That means their instance won't receive new posts or comments from yours, and any communities hosted on your instance won't be searchable on theirs.
This seems like a sweet mess, having different copies of everything lol.
It's the basis of federation. Think of it like regular SMS. You can try to send a message to someone, but if they have their phone switched off or blocked you, they won't receive it.
I'm not hugely familiar with how federation works or why it works the way it does, but why is this better than say instances only hosting what is put on their instance and the browser fetching from multiple instances? So when I want to view something posted on instance A with my account on instance B, instead of instance B keeping a cache of the post my browser just fetches the content directly from instance A?
Well, all the instances kind of acknowledge the originating instance as the OG and it's also the relay. For example, this reply goes from my instance, to sh.itjust.works, to your instance. If sh.itjust.works defederated from my instance you wouldn't see this at all even though you're not on sh.itjust.works.
In a nutshell, beehaw's server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won't see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won't be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
And what happens when they refederate??? all the backlog of comments/posts will spam them?
See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for the dirty details about how asymmetric defederation impacts us. It's stupid complicated.
Yeah, I read that thread, it helped me a lot!
If you're not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn't defederated by any of them you can view it all.