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)?
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)?
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.
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
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.
That’s not a bug though, that’s just how federation works
It’s a corner case that could maybe be handled differently in ways that wouldn’t have the surprising consequence, though.
B can defederate from A if it wants to prevent these bastard communities.
Pretty much except you should stop seeing any new content or posts from the defederated community. Old threads will still exist and effectively be unmoderated, but the comments there will only exist on your server. Any federated server will see the ‘true’ thread from the original instance.
Sure, but instance B has many users, and they can all now use B’s view of C@A as an unmoderated forum to post Evil Stuff. No moderator on B can do anything about that; the B admin can maybe only just ban those users?
This is kind of analogous to the problem on IRC of who gets ops on a channel in a netsplit. Currently the “split” of A defederating from B causes B’s view of C@A to have no ops. (At least, if I’m understanding correctly.)