I think I understand how the federation system works currently and I’m not sure if I think this is a good thing, but why does federation require the entire link between communities to be broken?
Like say that Community A wants to block out Community B. That’s fine, but can Community B still see posts on A? And if not, why not?
And to go further, if I’m part of Community A and I still want to interact with Community B, why can’t I? Like is there a reason for forcing users to only interact with communities that are federated?
Again, I understand there are restrictions with data and how things currently work. I’m just asking from an abstract perspective about the fundamental ideas.
I’m not sure how federation work with Lemmy (I think the answer is no), but in mastodon, for example, you have different types of defederation.
Limiting an instance means that the users on the defederating instance cannot see post from the defederated instance, except from those belonging to users they follow. But people from the defederated instance can see post from the defederating instance
Suspending an instance means that all connection between instances is lost and people in those instances cannot talk to each other, follow each other nor see each other’s posts in any timeline. Instance are, in general, suspended when they house bad actors (hateful/“free speech”, illegal content, etc).
Defederation is a serious tool and it’s never done without good reasons. It exist to protect users and make their experience better. Even if its only by limiting an instance.
I don’t think there’s a level of defederation that allows people from a server to read post from another they are/were defederated from, but not to participate on them.