If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.

Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.

Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.

So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.

I can understand part of the motivation for doing this, but does this not immediately make it significantly harder for users to evaluate an instance and make decisions about whether or not to join an instance based on what other instances it allows/blocks?

If I’m understanding this change correctly, it would hinder user’s ability to find an instance that’s well-aligned to them because no one (including potential new users) will be able to see one of the most important metrics governing how an instance chooses to operate (what it federates and defederates with).

I think you are missing a big piece of the bigger picture.

Much of the ‘utility’ of the lemmy alternatives is the significantly larger user base, which is what’s necessary for more niche communities to get off the ground and actually be viable. Without that userbase, lemmy is just another alternate place to discuss the basest common topics, that can be discussed anywhere. I mean, technology and news are nice to have, but it’s the variety of the niche community that are what keep people still hooked on reddit.

So in the end, making a place popular for the sake of popularity actually does serve an important purpose.

Here are some basic definitions:

Instance: a Lemmy server with its collection of local users and local communities

Federation: allowing users of one instance the ability to participate and interact with the content and users of another instance

Defederation: “blocking” an entire instance and its users from participating and interacting with the content and users of another instance.

Every instance maintains a publicly visible “instances” list where you can see which instances are allowed/federated (listed as “Linked Instances” and which other instances are disallowed/defederated (listed as “Blocked Instances”. That list is always at the same predictable URL for every instance ( https://[instance]/instances ). For Lemmy.World, that list would be at https://lemmy.world/instances.

Instances operators also have the ability to surgically block specific users or specific communities from other instances. This doesn’t mean they have ‘defederated’, it just means they have blocked a specific use or instance. These are considered moderation activities and show up in an instance’s moderation log (also called the “modlog”). Every instance’s modlog is public and visible at the predictable URL of https://[instance]/modlog. For Lemmy.World, the modlog would be at https://lemmy.world/modlog. The modlog has a “filter by action” dropdown making it easy to find certain types of moderation activities. If you search the modlog for “removing communities” you can see the communities that an instance has removed or blocked.

In the case of the piracy communities, they were removed from Lemmy.world, but federation still exists between Lemmy.world and the other instances where those blocked communities still exist.

You specifically cite the example of piracy going away as a reason for wanting to compare instance’s defederations, but that activity had nothing to do with defederation. Lemmy.world is still federated with the instances that hosted the piracy communities.

Lemmy.world users no longer see it in all/community search results, and if trying to navigate to the Lemmy.world url for the community specifically (like this: https://lemmy.world/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) they just get an error.

So the only way they would discover that communities are blocked is if they absolutely know the community actually exists by visiting the foreign instance.

The only other way I’ve discovered you can see what communities an instance has blocked is by parsing through the public modlog.

dbzer0 is not blocked from lemmy.world - https://lemmy.world/instances.

So while you are technically correct that you can publicly see who is blocking who by looking at their instance list, your answer isn’t relevant to the question of blocked communities where there hasn’t been total instance-blocking.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to see an instance’s blocked communities except by reading/searching their modlog.