No problem! You can find admins and users talking a lot about this by searching for the #p92 and #fedipact hashtags, lots of instances are preemptively defederating from Meta domains, although the software hasn't implemented federation yet
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.
Absolutely. Gonna set up my own Lemmy instance so I can defederate any corporate instance. If other people want to accept their smallpox blankets, that's on them.
I'd have to agree. Facebook polluted up the social media landscape with their gross business tactics, to the point where many people ditched traditional social media entirely and created/moved to the fediverse. Now they're getting ready to start dumping their toxic sludge here too, and I'd hope that most of the popular areas of the fediverse would just shut them out entirely. They deserve zero goodwill from anybody and are almost guaranteed to be bad-faith actors IMO.
I'm not holding out hope, however. I assume they'll play nice for the first year or two, integrate with everything, and then enshittify this as well. It's just the way things go.
It doesn't have to be like that here. If we don't like it we can spin up our own instances. If everyone is already here it wouldn't even be painful. The accounts mean nothing here. Theres no karma or awards, just how it should be.
Lol yeh there's still some wrinkles to be ironed out, I was accidentally posting loads of times because Jerboa told me my comment didn't go through when really it did.