The federation occurred when the post was made, it was sent out to other servers and stored there. Then it got served to those users directly, without further contacting chaos.social.

To understand how it's decentralized, search for @[email protected] on your own fediverse home server and the post will pop up.

There's a particular user story here which is a bunch of people who don't have accounts on any server, wanting to see the content from a central location (chaos.social). I do think it's worth talking about this story and ways to fix it but it's not really accurate to blame it on the federation behavior.

They redirect you if you aren't logged in so you can't use them as an anonymous proxy. If you're logged in on your homeserver, you'll get that server's view of the post.

Could you expand on why being an anonymous proxy would be an issue in this case? I can't think of anything interesting off the top of my head.

You can't post (because you're not logged in), so there's no issues with moderation. The toot is already federated publically, so there's no issues with unintentional read access. It doesn't need to contact the original server, so there shouldn't be any load/DDoS issues. I must be missing something…

I produced those links by finding the post on each server so I was also surprised that they redirect when accessed directly. I mean it showed me the post without being logged in, and then I copied what was in the URL bar. Given how much browsing is available without being logged in I agree this should be fine if it loaded normally.

ugh I wish I had tried to generate these through a non-mastodon instance, could have saved a lot of confusion. It works fine through Calckey:

https://calckey.social/notes/9ebxxsy83i