Does someone have / know of a good guide on federation and specifically (this is the only bit I'm interested in) how the 'silence' domain 'block' works, how it affects the public feeds, what content is visible, what are the conditions of that visibility, etc. ?
@welshpixie I believe that "silence" means that you still have to approve follow requests even if your account is public, and their toots won't show up on the federated timeline. Otherwise it shouldn't be affected.
@fluffy Yeah, I'd like more detailed information than that though - will the posts of people on a silenced instance show up in hashtag searches? If a user on .art boosts an account from a silenced instance, but from an account they follow, will other users see it even if they're not following them?
@welshpixie @fluffy For the second question: yes. Explicitly boosted toots will not be affected by the silence.
There does seem to be a bug when you downgrade from a block to a silence, where previously-known accounts from that instance remain wholly blocked/suspended. At least in upstream Mastodon.
@welshpixie @fluffy Should be fine then :) No idea about the hashtag search behaviour, though.
@joepie91 @welshpixie Ah, that sounds super annoying, and might explain the issue that was happening here: https://mastodon.social/@Andy_P/109317832833673758
@fluffy @welshpixie Inbound follow requests *do* work for me, though I would not be surprised if this downgrade process was buggy in more than one (inconsistent) way either
@joepie91 @welshpixie Yeah new follow requests work for me, but I suspect that in the case of @Andy_P he'd been following me for a long time (following from twitter and then through a few instance migrations) and there was probably a stale one which had resulted in a follow where the request was dropped. He canceled his request and made a new one and that worked.
@joepie91 @fluffy Thanks! That's fine, we're going the other way, from nothing to silence :)