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.

[–] Attempted_Render@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MeowdyPardner@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.