It's too bad they won't allow funding to go towards development of just the software itself, separately from the moderation and other costs of maintaining Lemmy.ml. As it is, Lemmy is a tankie platform first and foremost, and only secondarily offered for use by the rest of the world. You can see this in the development philosophy even: like even Reddit offers a modmail, notification upon moderation events, and ability to see deleted posts (PieFed offers some of this too), though Lemmy offers strong rights to instance admins, and somewhat lessened ones for moderators, but significantly weaker privileges to mere users (who I guess they feel don't deserve to be told upon e.g. being banned from an instance, and instead merely have to find out the hard way?).

Be careful not to use up your voting rations.

Piefed is problematic in its own ways, just FYI. I don’t know what it is about fediverse devs and trying to insert themselves as supermods, but the two seem to be strongly correlated.

A lot of the moderation that causes users public grief are usually just timeouts. Arguments over politics and ideology, etc quite often catch folks a timeout. Folks will debate a two day ban for a week.

And with the Fediverse: many community moderators are also admins of instances.

So with that in mind: moderation policies quickly convert drama between users to drama between instances.

To add to what Vicinus said, it's like when people get divorced - it's a breakdown of communication between instances, a means of last resort. Here is a recent example when your instance defederated from Lemmy.org:

due to lack of moderation on their side. This instance has open registrations, seemingly zero abuse prevention on signup, including not requiring emails. This leads to a small number of people constantly creating new disposable accounts for various types of abuse with zero consequences. Their admin is the CEO of an ad company, which surely doesn’t affect incentives. They do virtually zero moderation, allowing all these abusive accounts to rampantly harass other instances...

We, as well as other people, including at least one admin of another instance, have attempted to reach out to them about their lack of moderation, but we haven’t received any response at all. At this point there isn’t really anything left besides defederating them, which several other instances have already done as well.

Or here is the historical statement about defederation from Hexbear: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330, though those links are very old and probably not functional anymore.

It's like when someone repeatedly sends you unsolicited spam, even after you beg and plead with them to stop, and so as a last resort you finally block them. Incels arguing against it claim that their right to speak should triumph over your right to not have to listen but... that is simply not true.

My understanding, using the federation-email analogy, defederation is like yahoo mail and gmail users not being able to send and receive emails from each other. In this case lemmy.world and lemmy.ml can't see each others users/communities/posts/comments/votes (someone can correct me if I'm mistaken about any part).

Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz just made a post about instance defederations. TL:DR of the post is only 3 instances/servers have any significant defederation (>5%). 2 "tankie" instances (lemmygrad.ml [67%] and hexbear.net [64%]) and the porn instance (fedinsfw.app [13%]).