Why lemmy.world should not defederate from beehaw.org.
What defederating would mean:
We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').
beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I'm quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.
Lets avoid defederating. I am not to sure why beehaw.org defederated Lemmy.world, i understand it's not a final decision but more of a quick mitigation to deal with de difficulty related to the reddit exodus. Right?
I'm not using beehaw and probably never will. I don't want to be in a "safe space" as they put it. That said, I totally understand that some people want that sort of community, it's their decision, and thanks to federation anyone who disagrees can just leave. If you're complaining about them defederating from you - you're probably part of the reason they did.
That said, it would be really helpful to have some sort of icon next to posts/comments that are defederated from your instance, just so you don't waste your time responding to them when they can't see it.
They might also remove the block again in the future when moderation tools have improved and/or lemmy.world does a better job at vetting users, and then it would work better to have never blocked them.
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It's going to happen again and again, there's no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can't communicate directly? We're going to find out.
So we'll still see posts from beehaw users on other instances that beehaw still federates with?
Will we be able to interact with the above posts (vote / comment)? I'm guessing yes, because the posts would be hosted on those 3rd party instances still federating with beeehaw, not beehaw.
If I inderstand correctly, I'd be in favor of keeping the federation, which in short means "keep interaction with beehaw users through other instances", even if we lost sync and interaction with "communities / posts in those communities. hosted by beehaw"
This whole defederation situation seems like putting the power in the hands of the wrong people.
Users should choose what they want to see/interact with. Maybe subs/mods. Not entire servers imho.
If certain subs on beehaw want to restrict access, fine because users choose to participate. If users want to restrict themselves or control their own experience, fine because it only impacts them. But when it's done at a server level you have given too much power to people that aren't part of your community.
Work with the other instances first. Try to find a compromise. This should be done as a very, very last resort. And that’s not the impression I’m getting at all. Just a pain in the ass for users, and barely a hurdle for troll, which I’ve not seen much of on the first place.