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So the answer to your original question is yes, some instances are closed off from others, but you didn't mess anything up. Instance A can "defederate" from Instance B, which makes it so that users of either instance cannot see or interact with content or users from the other instance. This is unilateral- even if Instance B does not defederate Instance A, it is still blocked from seeing or interacting with Instance A.
However, with regards to your later questions, you didn't mess anything up. It's simply that federation is not retroactive. When the first person from Instance A subscribes to something from Instance B, the two instances are then federated, and content begins being shared from that point forward. It does not retroactively add old content from Instance B to Instance A. For now, it matters relatively heavily, as instances are being federated constantly, even though the content flow is somewhat light. As content flow increases and new instances begin to stabilize, it will matter less. As time goes on, the content "before federation" will be vastly outweighed by the content "after federation".
This is all somewhat compounded by the fact that lemmy instances are absolutely slammed right now. Kbin.social had to defederate entirely for a while just to keep from crashing. Give it time for the spike to stabilize and it will work more smoothly.
Ah, retroactive federation makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for your detailed response, it's a great ELI5!
You're very welcome, I'm glad it was helpful. I'm still learning about all this myself.
lol ok. so if I'm reading right: members of the Reddit v Mod Refugee's club is giving lemmy and kbin.social the old slashdot effect. And to keep the server from protesting the enormous number of newbies coming. The server admins decided to unlink from other servers who were like: uh what's up bro our instance are being spammed. and kbin.social said: : uuuuh, er uuuh helpme. ok let me turn of content sharing and check the logs.
But you say things should get better?
I'm guessing the specific dates it struggled were around the saturday to monday.
Sorry if this is a silly question but. Let's say I have an account on kbin, and kbin hasn't been federated with instance B yet. I would need to subscribe to a community from instance B and from that point on they would be federated right? But how would I even subscribe if kbin can't see any communities from instance B before they are federated?
It's not a silly question at all, and it's one of the most unintuitive parts of the Fediverse. The most straightforward way is to go to the community you want to subscribe to (you can see a fairly comprehensive list at browse.feddit.de). Copy the URL from that community. Go back to Kbin and paste that URL into the search bar. If it doesn't show up immediately, wait a few seconds then refresh, and it should.
There is some shorthand to how you can search- for example, searching "!(community name)@(instance home URL)" works as well, but Kbin in particular is a bit odd because it uses an @ for both community and instance, instead of the rest of Lemmy which uses the !. Like I said, the most straightforward way is just to copy the URL itself and figure out the shortcuts later.