I tried being vegan, but it's basically impossible in Eastern Europe. I settled for just being a vegetarian trying to reduce my cheese & milk consumption and made my peace with that.
Lemme give you 2 scenarios to explain why defederation is an important option:
An instance with views and forms of diacourse wholly incompatible with yours. As a hyperbolic silly example to illustrate, let's say there's a community of cultists who believe in Cthulhu. They encourage a steady diet of kidnapped babies, and ritual drownings. They brigade like crazy, and their moderators encourage them to do this. Anybody who doesn't follow the great old one is an idiot, an asshole, and they express this in extremely vulgar terms. If they were a reddit community, they'd get banned. Here, they get isolated to their own little corner where they can't scream obscenities at people.
An instance with thousands of bots spamming out innocuous looking links that lead to malware. Again, if they were a reddit bot farm, (hopefully) they'd be banned. Here, as it's an open source project and you can't restrict who uses it and for what, defederation is the best you can do.
Lemmygrad seems to be a bit of a target of defederation by many instances, and there's probably some history there that I'm not aware of as I'm also new to Lemmy. Even though I may not agree with some of their hardline views, the users seem to be respectful when commenting over here on lemmy.ml, and the very few times I've commented over there, they've been cool. Consequently, I'm glad lemmy.ml federates with them.
EDIT: I should probably state that even though I'm cool talking with the respectful users, had to block a few communities there. I don't want to see the Death to NATO community cheerleading the Russian invasion, for example.
That's an open issue on Github. The devs are currently in the middle of trying to optimize performance so the whole network doesn't go down on the 12th. If you know any webdevs willing to have at it, great!
You should be able to federate with all available communities by default.
The trick is that your instance will not pull in all communities by default. Once 1 person subscribes to a community (a bit tricky for the first time, see here), all users on your instance will start seeing that community in their "All" feeds.
Can definitely be done. Just need someone to do it. I need to read more of the documentation and figure out how all this works before contributing, I don't want to waste the dev's time coaching a newbie. That's the last thing they need right now.
Currently, the easiest way to find communities on remote servers to subscribe to is the community browser. I'm not sure how this problem could be solved technically in future, but yeah, discoverability is hard atm.
Definitely yes on lemmy in general, definitely no to lemmy.ml. Pick a server you like the rules & admin for, maybe ask the admin directly, and direct everyone to that server. That way you can also host the PF2E community on that server.
Things are already getting way too centralized on lemmy.ml, we need to spread out a bit
True, but I agree with lemillionsock's core point. Nothing short of Reddit pulling the plug on the servers will cause 430 million monthly active users to shift in any short time-frame. However, what is likely to happen is a sharp decline in quality as the core content contributors move on, then a slow gradual decline as the remaining users go "Where'd all the content go?".
Right now, there is no import/export. It's a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I've been following all the optimization work they've been doing on github, I don't know if they sleep). You'll have to start over atm, sorry.
Hi all, wandering around random small Lemmy servers seeing if I can be of use. To pull communities into your instance, you need to first have someone subscribe. Useful picture in this comment, but basically you go to "Communities" at the top, and start a search with the full URL of the community you want (https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy, for example) and change "Communities" to "All" in the search options.
Once you've clicked through to the community and subscribed, it'll be pulled in forever. If you want to dig around for communities to subscribe to, go to the community finder.