Voyager is all you’ll ever need^^

But it does.
Example: You’re on lemmy.world. Let’s say lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml today.

Now you won’t be able to see any new posts made by users of lemmy.ml, be it on lemmy.ml itself or on any other instance. You will still see everything that was posted up until the defederation though because defederation just means that your instance won’t request new copies of the content of lemmy.ml .
And they also can’t post stuff on comunities of lemmy.world(I believe they technically could do that, just that nobody could see it, but it may be that by now it’s entirely blocked to even make a post there).

Now as long as lemmy.ml doesn’t defederate lemmy.world too, their users will still be able to see your comments and may also reply to your comments on other instances, but you won’t see that.

So defederation mainly serves two purposes for the users of the instance that defederates another instance:

1. Their users won’t see any content from comunities of those instances in their “all” feed and also won’t see any posts from users of that instance in the comment sections of any comunity of any instance.
2. Users of those instance won’t be able to post on their instance.

Everything you post in a beehaw community won’t be seen by anyone else. Everything you post in a community of any other instance will be seen by everyone who isn’t on an instance that defederated yours

You said they don’t display the downvotes, I asked if the algorithm that does the sorting still uses them (since they’re federated so the info is technically there and can be seen by other instances) or if it also ignores them.

But the question has now been answered below so it’s all clear

But do they just don’t display them or do they really don’t use them, like could you change the „top“ sorting of any NoDownvotesCommunity just by accessing it from another instance and place downvotes

I mostly used “Top day” recently, “New” isn’t really good with “All”, more with “Subscribed”.
Browsing lemmyverse.net is useful when I actively want to search for a specific community.
With the current size of Lemmy, I mostly use “All” because I might find interesting stuff from comunities that I didn’t think of before.

maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t care so much about lemmy growing. it’s great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.

Yeah it doesn’t have to get as big as reddit and I don’t think it ever will, but at least right now I feel my “All” feed doesn’t really change that much within 2-3 days so I’d like a couple more users on here^^

if you joined lemmy.world for example as a new user, you won’t be able to see new comments made by users of beehaw.org. Only those who were made before defederation because they’re still part of the copy of your instance.

Edit: Had it backwards, you can see their posts, but you’re still affected by the defederation because you can’t interact with them since they won’t see your posts, regardless on which instance you make it.
And if you comment on a community that is actually hosted direclty on beehaw.org, no other user from any other instance will see your posts because beehaw won’t publish comments from your instance to the other ones.

The admin of lemm.ee just wrote a long post about the consequences of the latest defederations of instances that are most likely spam bots

What does defederation mean for me as a lemm.ee user?
You will not be able to see any new posts or comments from defederated instances made on ANY instance.
You will still be able to see old ones that they made before defederation
Users from defederated instances will not be able to post or comment at all in communities hosted on lemm.ee

Not what I said, but okay…

So you think that being a nazi automatically means that every view you have on anything is bad by default or that you are not able to participate in any normal conversations that don’t touch that topic, like technology or gaming, without writing racist stuff?
Because that would be the only reason defederation would be justified in my eyes.
In any other case, just don’t visit their home instance.

If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island.

And what if they post racist shit all day on their own instance but also post normal and helpful stuff on communities of other instances? Just don’t visit their communities, that’s it. No need to block potentially helpful posts of members of that instance everywhere.
The same thing when there’s a NSFW and your own instance doesn’t want to see NSFW stuff. That’s fine but it’s not like the users of that NSFW instance are running around posting porn on every other community.

If some of them do, block the users. But there’s no reason defederating the whole instance because those users can and do also participate just fine in other topics that have nothing to do with NSFW or nazi stuff.

For example why should a programmer that has a nazi instance as his home not be allowed to post memes in a community about programming humour from a regular instance, when he doesn’t post anything there that is in any way related to him being a nazi?

the “problematic” part are the users that join that instance because it’s big but don’t expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.

Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won’t have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.

Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet

I don’t think that would solve the legal issue so it doesn’t really matter in many cases. Even if you personally blocked an instance, your home instance will still recieve copies of that instance as long as someone else is interacting with it. And with that comes the fear of unintentionally hosting something illegal on your instance becasue you have the copies from that other instance.

So again there would be no other solution than defederating.

Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?

Besides that Nazis were just one extreme example, even there you can make the case that not everything people there care about is nazi stuff.
It’s like looking at a specifically Christian instance you wouldn’t expect their users to only ever post or comment about God or Jesus.
Users of such an instance can very well comment on instances like gaming or technology that have nothing to do with their particular instance world view and you wouldn’t know they are nazis and it also wouldn’t matter, instead their comments would benefit the thread just as much as any other comments.

By defederating the instance, you’ll also block interactions like this.

Lets take a tech community on a regular instance as an example. I make a post because I have a problem that needs quick help. Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis? No because that has nothing to do with the thread. If he can help my with my problem I would want to see his post.

we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de

Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn’t blocked. Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.

Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^

and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.

That’s the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.

But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it’s not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that’s simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.

and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.

Not only that. Had lemmy.ml defederated sh.itjust.works, users of lemmy.ml also wouldn’t see comments from sh.itjust.works members on any other instance.

The biggest issue I have with defederating is that you basically exclude every member of that instance from discussion on other instances even when they keep their nsfw post completely within their own instance.

If I’m on Instance A that defederated Instance B because it’s NSFW friendly, then I also can’t see comments from members of Instance B in completely unrelated comunities on other Instances.

Technically they are also be able to comment on beehaw content, but then only their members can actually see that comment because their instance will have a copy of that content but beehaw won’t publish it to the other instances, so it doen’t make much sense to do so

It just looks like an actual app and not like a tab in your browser(no adress bar for example), plus you can access it quickly that way without having to navigate your browser tabs

It’s concerning that he’s not just acting on his own like a dictator and instead let the members of the instance decide?

The way I always viewed those up- and downvotes was as a quicker way of commenting with “I like/agree with this” or “I don’t like/agree with this” and that would be there for everyone to see too, so why shouldn’t that be true for upvotes?

Though it’s bad design that you can’t see this info on lemmy but you can see the info about lemmy users on kbin. Either have lemmy show that info too or limit the info on kbin to up/downvotes from kbin users only.