I’m just curious, since I tend to get attached to my accounts but I also like having access to all information so I don’t want to use a defederated instance. If, say, kbin got overrun by bad actors and was defederated by everyone else, is the only option to jump ship? Unfortunately I don’t have the capability to selfhost or I would to avoid such problems.
What are your contingency plans if such a thing occurs?
An easy-ish way to explain it is to use the example of email. Gmail, Outlook, Proton, your private email server…they all are independent of each other but can interact with each other. That interaction is “federation”. Kbin, Lemmy, and even Mastodon, PeerTube, et al can interact with each other even though they are independent of each other, yet alone not the same “usage” (i.e., link aggregators vs. microblogs vs video hosting…).
Defederation simply means ending the interaction. The instance will still operate as is, but will not interact with what it has defederated from. In the case of Beehaw, they still interact with the rest of the Fediverse, but not with the instances they blocked.
To circle back to the email example, if your private email server defederated from Outlook, you’d still be able to send/receive email from the others, but not Outlook.
Imo email is the perfect metaphor for this. You explain how email works and how even though Gmail looks different from outlook, both gmail and outlook users can interact with each other in the same email thread. Then, you say “now replace email with reddit/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.” I feel like I could explain this shit to my dad with this metaphor.