Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking and posted at the same time. I think this would be a very useful way to encourage federation while maintaining instance control.

While I like the idea of granular permissions in principle, I feel like it could cause confusion and frustration for users depending on its implementation. For instance, if a user from instance A is unable to reply to a user from instance B, even though both are posting on instance C and are visible to each other. So while granular permissions would be powerful, they could also introduce unwanted scenarios that would be difficult for the average user to understand.

That's why I think it would be good to start with a simpler system. Partial defederation (or limited federation) seems like a compromise which could strike a reasonable balance between controlling content on local instances while minimizing the impact on user experience across instances. That said, if permissions/rights were implemented in a limited or user-friendly way, they could also work.

The Beehaw mods explicitly said that the defederation was due to lack of good mod tools combined with lack of time to moderate manually, and that they didn't really want to defederate but didn't know what else to do.

At the very least this move highlighted a big problem with the Fediverse that needs to be ironed out. So I guess that’s good.

I am not totally against or in favour of what they are doing and I can't even say what side I tip to. I feel very 50/50.

I think it is in a "meta" way useful for the community, especially those of us (like me) new to the fediverse, to see it. However it goes, we can look and see and form opinions and learn. If it is a mistake, it's a mistake that is inevitable. The capacity is built into the tools and someone was going to use it.

I only wish I knew how or where some sort of.. journalism?... record? was being kept so that things could be understood later by the people not here to see it. So that the same mistakes don't have to happen every 6 months.

EXACTLY

It seems like defederating harms the ones who do it, as it provides incentives for users who want to access both servers to go to a 3rd party. From kbin I can currently see both.

Beehaw block lemmy.wolrd and sh.itjust.works

https://beehaw.org/post/567170?scrollToComments=true

The site grew something like twenryfold in the span of two days... Honestly I'm impressed at how mild the ridiculousness has been

I have a feeling that given a couple of years, things will settle out a bit and be more like Mastodon.

Could you imagine if your ISP/Gmail was so particular about what servers you could send email to?

There will always be valid reasons to defederate, although I think the bar for that is going to end up pretty high and well-defined in the future, but it's sort of an organic process to get there.

Not necessarily. There's a Mastodon setting that would have worked here, it lets users from your community interact with another but doesn't let users from that community come into yours.

Remote instance users can interact with local instance by posting and commenting on local instance, but remote communities are blocked on local instance

This feels like the lose/lose option? The major reason sites defederate from another is that users on that remote site cannot be meaningfully moderated. This is usually because there's too much traffic coming from a poorly moderated instance, and there are too many uncooperative users showing up from there.

It's not the group objects that are the problem, it's the users.

Remote users can see posts/comments from local instance, but not the other way around and commenting and posting is disabled both ways

There's no reason to disable posting. When you access a "remote" community from your local instance, you are in no way actually on that remote site. You're not directly interacting with anything remote. Instead, that remote content is mirrored on your local instance. You interact with the local copy, and then the servers sync the content.

Defederation merely shuts down this syncing.

You could, conceivably -- though I'm not sure if this is something that ActivityPub allows -- have a federation mode where you push out content to a remote site, but merely do not accept update from it. This does nothing to foster the community locally, though, and is probably at least as alienating as being able to see a discussion other people are having in a view-only mode where you cannot interact with anyone at all.

It really just seems better to me to find another community built around the same topic. Or, if you find yourself on an instance that's being defederated by a lot of other sites, pick up and move to another instance, because it's probably signalling that something fishy's going on on your current one.

The defederation tier that's currently missing is "silencing", which basically enforces subscription approvals from silenced websites. So, you click subscribe, the mods see that someone wants to subscribe to the community, they check out your profile, and then, finding you're not causing problems for others, they approve your subscription.

Also useful would be the ability to set communities as 'Local Only'.

Yeah people are not going to migrate over if they hear they can't interact with everyone. "Be careful which instance you sign up with because other instances may have blacklisted you, but I can't tell you which home instance to use because it might get overloaded."

Same