PrinceHabib72

You're very welcome, I'm glad it was helpful. I'm still learning about all this myself.

So the answer to your original question is yes, some instances are closed off from others, but you didn't mess anything up. Instance A can "defederate" from Instance B, which makes it so that users of either instance cannot see or interact with content or users from the other instance. This is unilateral- even if Instance B does not defederate Instance A, it is still blocked from seeing or interacting with Instance A.

However, with regards to your later questions, you didn't mess anything up. It's simply that federation is not retroactive. When the first person from Instance A subscribes to something from Instance B, the two instances are then federated, and content begins being shared from that point forward. It does not retroactively add old content from Instance B to Instance A. For now, it matters relatively heavily, as instances are being federated constantly, even though the content flow is somewhat light. As content flow increases and new instances begin to stabilize, it will matter less. As time goes on, the content "before federation" will be vastly outweighed by the content "after federation".

This is all somewhat compounded by the fact that lemmy instances are absolutely slammed right now. Kbin.social had to defederate entirely for a while just to keep from crashing. Give it time for the spike to stabilize and it will work more smoothly.

I don't really need this, I've already swapped all my apps and home page to lemmy, but seriously, I had to applaud the name. lemmyreddirectyou... 10/10.

Okay, but the same thing would have happened if they all joined Beehaw directly, or were spread out among many many instances. Part of Beehaw's logic was "Well, a disproportionate amount of moderation had to be done to lemmy.world so we defederated", but isn't that simply because there are more users on that particular instance? If, for example, we assume every single lemmy.world user joined separate instances and behaved the exact same way, would Beehaw have defederated all of their instances? If not, then the response wasn't the correct one, in my opinion. What happened is that Beehaw saw their mod work increasing, and nuked a large portion of their active userbase (federated users from non-Beehaw instances) to cut it down to try to maintain the culture they're trying to build. Unfortunately, I think all it will have done is throttled their growth and Beehaw will become an isolated instance with no large communities on its own, because the communities that were there (that lemmy.world was participating in) will just be recreated on different instances.

I hear what you're saying, but the reason it took me until the reddit blackout to join lemmy, even though I'd heard of it right after the API pricing was announced, was because I was paralyzed by choice and FOMO. What if I join an instance that gets defederated, or defederates, from something I enjoy? I have to either make a separate account over there or never see that content. Look at what just happened with Beehaw. If I'd stayed on lemmy.world (the first instance I joined), I'd be shit out of luck because half of what I'm subscribed to is Beehaw. The instance I'm on now has (so far) not defederated ANYTHING, which for me is a good thing, since it leaves my options completely open, regardless of whether I intend to use those options or not. It still doesn't protect my instance from BEING defederated, but there's nothing I can do about that. That type of uncertainty and FOMO needs to be addressed if the fediverse is going to continue to expand.

Not that I know of without going to that instance, and possibly signing up on that instance depending on how they have it set up. Then to actually subscribe you have to manually copy the URLs into the search bar of your home instance. It's definitely an issue, and I hope they streamline subscribing to remote communities soon.

Several very large subs and quite a few smaller ones have committed to remaining private until reddit backtracks or they are removed and opened by reddit admins. It's not quite over, but I don't think the average user cares enough, unfortunately.

Yes, but remember the 1% rule. 90% of users lurk, 9% comment, 1% contribute. The power users upset at this change are at least in the 9%, if not the 1%, and enough of them go, the site grinds to a halt for the other 90%.

At least here they're being shit on like the weak-willed idiots they are.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1494sa8/gaming_is_now_public

Well that was a frustrating read. I don't get it. Why are people so okay with reddit treating them like garbage?

As far as I know, no. Hello from someone who was trying to click a different link and this one popped up. I do know they're working on it on github.

I'm not on an instance with no downvotes, as I do think they have SOME purpose (though you're right that it is usually a bit of a disagree-so-shut-up button rather than anything else), but I agree with the rest. The content here is certainly slower. On reddit, I could just refresh the main page and have dozens of new posts to interact with- here, not so much. I don't think that's a bad thing, though. I still get my mindless scrolling when I'm poopin or something like that, but I'm spending a lot less time online than I did. I'm reading more, I'm working on my novels, I'm WAY more productive at work. I used RiF exclusively on my phone, and so I decided pretty soon after the API announcement that I was done. All the protest and reddit's hilariously mismanaged response has done has cemented my resolve.