This was discussed in the early days of federation and the consensus was that a block should be a hard-block as most likely the offending instance isn’t contributing in a good way on 3rd party communities either.

However it looks like the allow-list is less strict and lets comments from non-allowed instances through if they are on 3rd party communities. But I have not confirmed this myself.

I believe so. If I understood it correctly, you are really just commenting on a copy of the original post on sh.itjust.works so the original comment is on sh.itjust.works and needs to federate from there.

But I am likely wrong, so wait for someone else to respond.

correct, beehaw and sh.itjust.works users can both read and post to communities on lemmy.ml, but they can’t see eachother’s posts or comments (because the beehaw admins defederated from sh.itjust.works).

btw, I (as an admin at lemmy.ml) am deleting this post from asklemmy because it is a lemmy support question.

If I understand this whole federation thing correctly, when a user makes a post/comment, that content is tied to their home instance.

So if the instance goes down, that content disappears completely. It’s not cloned to other instances.

Ergo the same should be the case if the instance gets defederated - content made by its users should become unavailable to instances that don’t federate with it.

Am I correct?