Since my last post yesterday, lemmy.world has added over 3000 new users, bringing the total user count to 22000 today (source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list). It firmly holds the position of the second-largest lemmy instance, surpassing beehaw.org by a significant margin of 10000 users.
In other news, beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world a few hours ago. How does the third-largest instance only have 4 mods for its 12000 users?!
So much going on!
You should still be able to view and comment on beehaw as normal so you don't have to miss those communities. Defederation is a one way street. So it's just like lemmy.world doesn't exist as far as beehaw is concerned. We can't have any impact on their vote counts from their perspective, they won't see our comments regardless of the instance it's posted on, they can't visit any communities from lemmy.world, etc. But unless lemmy.world defederates from beehaw we will still be able to view, vote on, comment on, etc anything from beehaw as normal. It's just that you are less likely to get any sort of interaction so you are disincentivized from doing so. Technically we could still comment on a beehaw post and anyone from lemmy.world or any other instance that hasn't defederates with us would still be able to see and reply to that comment.
That's very interesting. I didn't realize it worked that way. You're saying when one instance comments on a external instance the comment itself is still hosted by the first instance? It is hosted in the first instance and and update is sent to the external instance which would host a duplicate copy (but in this case is rejected)?
I've read most of the Lemmy documentation but these nuances of the architecture aren't well covered.
Edit: just found this post which clarifies it all: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Thanks for the link. It cleared up a slight misunderstanding that I had as well.