The tools are lacking, as you said.

This post is not about how things should be. It’s not about how things might be one day. It’s about how they are right now

Thanks, I really appreciate that. Education was the foremost goal of this post, and I’m glad some of that may have come through

I have absolutely seen some highly upvoted pillars of salt over there.

The intent of Beehaw appears to be giving people a safe place that they can return to, but they can venture out just as well. That ideal does not mesh with an allowlist. The goal doesn’t appear to be to curate a specific experience, it is to block bad actors from harassing Beehaw’s users on Beehaw’s hosted communities.

With this in mind, I think it absolutely does make sense for lemmy to include permissions that restrict what foreign users can do vs what local users can

Broadly speaking, that’s correct.

Regardless of how development goes in the future, this post is meant to highlight the realities of the current, and the ideological realities of what content on the fediverse is, as well as where you are served it from.

There exists no means to be private without defederating from literally every other instance.

I agree. These mechanisms are in place to stop the fediverse from becoming fedChan

Sure, and I should’ve been more clear and said people need to understand what the Fediverse is.

This is, ultimately, about what federation means and how this platform operates. Its deficiencies, and the way things work currently to address those deficiencies. What I have posted is just as true for kbin as it is for lemmy.

I do, personally, think it’s reasonable for an instance to have “private” communities exclusive to their own users. This is likely a subject that comes down to personal belief, but after dealing with so many trolls and bad actors on other platforms, I absolutely do see a need to have those kinds of permissions.

When/if refederation happens, the comments lost to the abyss will stay lost to the abyss. The source of truth will not update based on the past updates of a formerly defederated instance to my understanding

People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.

As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.

The only way to not address things on a per-server basis is for moderation tools to be expanded in scope. Maybe that will be how things work one day, but it is not how things can work right now.

Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.

When a Lemmy.World user posts to a Beehaw community right now, it updates the cached community that Lemmy.World stores. Beehaw has defederated with them, so the “source of truth” (hosted by Beehaw) never updates. The source of truth is what updates other federated instances. As a result, someone on startrek.website, for example, will not see posts made by lemmy.world users to beehaw communities. The only people who can see what lemmy.world users post to beehaw right now are other lemmy.world users.

It’s not my intent to determine how things “should” work.

This is how things DO currently work.

I don’t think that assertion is based in reality. A server has to be hosted somewhere, and admins will generally choose to uphold those local regulations for the sake of their instance’s own longevity. Federation has never meant that you communicate with literally every other instance. This isn’t Tor where nodes pass along communications that don’t directly involve themselves.

This isn’t handwringing, though I can understand why it might come off that way. This is simply mulling over how things “actually work” in the fediverse as opposed to how people believe it works. I believe that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is and how it works. This is an educational issue that we have an opportunity to begin sorting out

In addition, my scenario of instance users subscribing to illegal content will still be valid even with moderation tools. The only way to stop that currently is defederation with instances hosting illegal content.

That is correct, and this is why a new instance only shows the most recent 20 posts for a community until someone from the viewing instance subscribes to it. From that moment forward (barring de-federation), the host instance sends updates to the viewing instance. The viewing instance provides content to its users from the local copy that it stores.

Chat GPT can legitimately assist you here.

I’m not saying that it’s going to be 100% perfect, but I am saying that you can ask it to explain things in plain language and it generally does okay

I’ve been using mine since 2021, and despite the jokes my friends make, no one can actually tell the difference in my hair cut. It does help to have someone that can trim your neck line and ears though