Users on lemmy.world still have a "shadow" version of the beehaw communities on lemmy.world that would normally be synced but isn't anymore. Users on lemmy.world can post to that community and it can be seen by other users there but that post doesn't go back to beehaw or anyone still federated with them.
So just the interactions with the posts are blocked, not the posts themselves? I find it a bit weird, but OK.
It means that beehaw can't "hear" anything coming from lemmy.world.
When you write a comment, it gets saved to lemmy.world (or whichever home instance you're currently using). The lemmy.world instance then broadcasts your comment out to the Fediverse. Normally, this causes other instances to see your comment and save a copy locally, which is how it's possible to see your comment on other instances. Because Beehaw ignores lemmy.world, their instance ignores the broadcast containing your comment. It's never saved to Beehaw which stops the users logged in over there from ever having a chance to see it.
In addition to ignoring lemmy.world, Beehaw is also excluding lemmy.world from it's own broadcasts. So, if someone goes and creates a post on Beehaw, the lemmy.world instance will never get told about it thus stopping those logged into lemmy.world from ever knowing it existed. You simply can't interact with something that doesn't exist, even though lemmy.world technically isn't trying to stop you.
What you're seeing here is the overlap between these two effects. The lemmy.world instance knows of old posts that exist on Beehaw, because Beehaw was still talking to lemmy.world back then. Then you as a user on lemmy.world can see the post and write a comment on it, since your comment lives on lemmy.world. Finally, lemmy.world tries to tell Beehaw about your comment and gets ignored, preventing anyone on Beehaw from ever knowing it existed.
Maybe I missed some drama- why did Beehaw defederate? I have an account on there although I mainly use this one now
Beehaw, to my understanding, has 4 mods who do all the management for every single community in the entire instance.
Works okay when there's only 1,000 people.
Works less okay when there's 50,000.
The Beehaw admins saw a disproportionately high amount of rule breaking coming from lemmy.world. They posted about it and specifically said that the issue was a combination of lemmy.world's huge userbase and open-door signup policy.
Also Beehaw bills itself as a "safe and inclusive space" which is huge bait to a certain type of internet scumbag. It makes Beehaw a large target for trolling and abuse. Without tools to deal with this I can see the logic in just defederating until moderation can get better. They've also been in contact with the instances they've defederated from and are discussing ways to move forward because everyone realizes this isn't an ideal situation.
I can sympathize with why they felt this was their only option, but on the plus side, this situation might just spur development of real moderation tools that are desperately needed for anyone running a Lemmy instance. Some people want to hate on Beehaw for their decision but honestly we might all be benefiting from it in the long run.
Apparently some male user(s?) from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works went to a feminist sub/magazine/whatever on beehaw and was posting explicit pictures of their junk. I suppose the admin tools aren't there to automate preventing it, so they just defederated?
The owners/admins of any of the instances aren't mad or anything, they just disagree about how to vet users (or vet at all), so until there's better moderation tools, they just defederated.
If lemmy.world also defederates beehaw, then we won't see any content from beehaw either.
What I don't understand is that I've seen posts in Beehaw communities by Beehaw accounts. Surely that shouldn't be possible with defederation? Is there some delayed output that lemmy.world has access to but they can't see our input?
The way Beehaw defederated is that it simply refuses any updates issued from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Updates from Beehaw are still pushed out to multiple sources that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works can read from.
Why did Beehaw defederate? Do we know the actual reason?
They described their reasoning here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Effectively they have a very small mod/admin team and users from 2 instances with open signups were taking up a huge portion of their time.
Edit: And an update at least regarding sh.itjust.works https://beehaw.org/post/594843
Thank you for the response, the posts help put it in context for me
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