ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Beehaw sounds like a really toxic, Professor Umbridge-type place.
Exactly!
I like the fact that it has down voting disabled.
That’s not always a good thing. Some posts need to be downvoted.
Like everything in /c/conservative.
I really like that I can easily see upvotes vs downvotes. I’m not a reddit expert, but Apollo just showed the total/average/etc.
reddit used to show it
no they don’t. if it’s a stupid take it should be able to stand out to be mocked and flamed or at least discussed. it’s where learning happens and echo chambers dissolve. if it’s truly psychotic it can be deleted.
They should just be reported to the mods. Or better yet, just don’t upvote comments you don’t like. There is no karma on lemmy
I was a mod on an advice sub on reddit, this is a terrible idea.
It was enough work as a mod to sift through things that actually needed to be reported. For advice, downvotes are needed to express when something is genuinely bad advice. It can’t be up to mods to sift through every single comment, that’d be impossible.
Just don’t upvote bad advise and leave a comment of why it is bad. Downvoting has negative effects on the behavior of a community. It allows the majority to turn on the minority (sometimes the minority is wrong but still)
“i like the fact that i cant have an opinion”
Sorry what? Downvotes have always been useless for me personally.
Did you like youtube removing the dislikes? Having a negative opinion is just as important as a positive one. We could remove all voting like this.
Your welcome to have a negative option. However if you disagree with someone either ignore them or tell them why you disagree.
On the flipside you could just upvote comments you agree with.
Not every criticism has to be constructive. Do you tell the schef why the food sucks exactly if you dont like it? No. You just say “fuck this” and leave or ask the waiter to take it back because its bad. Not the best example but you get the point. You dont just ignore everything you dont like. I dont understand what people think the difference is, between up and downvoting. They are both the exact same. One point up, or minus one point. Each is just as valid as the other.
Beehaw is a safe place without trolls/fascists/racists/etc so they’ve just protected themselves from toxic trolls from lemmygrad or LW, that’s it.
Found the informant. And they think EVERYTHING is racist ect