I'm with lemmy.world and I can still see beehaw recent posts and I can interact with them despite us being mutually defederated. How does this actually work?
That explains it thanks. I thought we were mutually defederated (that's what I heard anyway). So essentially, if I were to comment under one of their posts, their users won't see my comment?
your home instance is making a copy of the remote instance.
Comments you make are on the local copy your home instance made.
Your instance tells the remote instance the comments made in your home copy.
Comments in your home copy are written to the remote instance.
Instances now have your comment when they copy the remote instance
Defederation breaks the process at step 3.
So your instance is still copying their remote content, and you can still see and comment on it, but those comments are only in your home instance. They can only be seen from people within your home instance looking at the same copy.
I’m pretty sure other lemmy.world users would see each others interactions, not sure how other instances would see it. I would assume others would, if they’re federated with world
I think not, even if other servers are federated with World, they are pulling the comments from Beehaw, so they wouldn’t see the comment. Your instance doesn’t check every other instance for the comments on a thread, just the instance that owns the community.
I think that is true just like the question of whether posts made, federated, then deleted would remain outside the instance. I can imagine the server drain if it had to recursively search through all history everywhere that's connected to do such things. A refederated server, or even a newly online server simply shouldn't spike the network with pulls from weeks, months, years back.
This is why Kbin has the boost button in addition to an upvote. That's being debated on if it's the best way to do it, or if there's a need for a more integrated way to do the same thing. It basically pushes old content back on the federated "stack" to refresh new views. Perhaps Kbin and Lemmy upvotes should do the same?