this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I explained this in my post: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Those communities still exist on this instance, they just aren't synced. You can see new posts from only lemmy.world users. Any posts/comments you make are not shared within the wider lemmyverse.
Effectively that community is a zombie community on this instance. Just unsub from that community, it's useless to you unless behave decides to refederate.
This is where the Lemmy interface could use some work. It should definitely notify users when they are about to post to an instance that is defederated with them and let them know that no other instances will see the post.
The fact that these communities exist to instances that are cutoff from the "true" instance is a horrible UX. There should be a giant "unplugged" overlay signaling that that youre essentially writing to a google doc that is not connected to the internet.
Out of curiosity, are lemmy.world mods still able to moderate these zombie communities?
It seems odd that people would be able to post in them when the people who are supposed to handle the communities just aren't there.
This is the correct answer, lots of people think defederating is one-directional when it's not. It's 100% blocked communication both ways, meant to be the nuclear option as a last resort (sadly the lack of other moderation tools makes it a second resort after reaching out to the other instance).
If defederating still allowed any communication, it wouldn't be useful if a remote instance was malicious and exploiting protocol-level bugs and trying to exploit other instances. Defederating should protect against that too, hence 0 communication whatsoever.
The uni-directional option would be limiting a remote instance, which unfortunately isn't implemented here.
I read elsewhere that it's not completely bidirectional when it comes to posts on a third party instance. For example, if lemmy.world and beehaw.org users both post to a thread on another instance that they are both still federated with, lemmy.world users will see the beehaw.org users' posts, but not the other way around.
I haven't confirmed if this is true yet though, so maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
When I say bidirectional disconnection I'm talking only about directly between the defederated instances in question since some people are suggesting that the instances are still directly sharing content in one direction. In your example the instances are still bidirectionally cut off, you're just suggesting that a third instance could relay content between them. That would be theoretically possible but I don't think it works like that currently, because that idea gets shot down in Mastodon for several reasons, including the fact that trusting content relayed to you from an intermediate server could open up the possibility of the relaying instance tampering or impersonating user accounts or faking content.