How many of the reddit users are bots?

For the most part that won’t be the case. They’ll all be interconnected. Beehaw is the only instance that I’m aware of that defederates as aggressively as they do. If you go to the bottom of any instance and click the “instances” link you can see who they have defederated. Most of them will have none or maybe a few defederated at most. Check out beehaw’s and you’ll see what I mean.

For a long time beehaw’s aggressive defederation and moderation policies made a large impact on the feel of Lemmy as a whole since they made up a decent portion of the user base, but now that there is more migration elsewhere like lemmy.world it’s just not as relevant what they do anymore. And with their sign ups being the way they are they will only become more and more irrelevant to the overall feeling of Lemmy. Which isn’t a bad thing for them necessarily. If they only want a small safe space or whatever then they are more than welcome to cultivate that however they want. But I wouldn’t be concerned about defederation on a larger scale where you never know if you’re posting on a defederated instance or not. Like 99% of the time everything will be federated.

No, they won’t be able to. The way that it works is since lemmy.world is defederated, beehaw won’t give or receive any information about changes made to their instance by lemmy.world users. When a different instance “visits” an outside instance like that they are really just creating a copy of the instance which is where the Lemmy.world users would be posting. Just like lemmy.world, any other instances, even ones we federate with, will create their own copy of beehaw’s instance whenever they visit. The issue is that since we are defederated beehaw doesn’t receive our updates therefore anyone going to beehaw to create their own copy won’t see our updates to that instance either. The post that I linked explains it better I think but that’s the gist anyway. Short answer, no, even if another instance federated with us they won’t see it. They don’t come to us to get the latest version of beehaw’s community, they go to beehaw. And since beehaw doesn’t let us update their version anyone who goes to them won’t receive our updates either.

I can see where you’re coming from for sure. There is nothing stopping lemmy.world from defederating as well which would clear up any confusion like this at the cost of further restricting its users. It would be nice though to have something like a visual warning or something letting the user know if they are visiting a community that is hosted on an instance which has defederated from their home instance. It could be something as simple as a little icon that if you click on it will link to a page explaining what defederation is or something.

https://lemmy.world/post/149743

That post does a better job of explaining in more detail if you want to learn more. It really isn’t so bad once you get a little bit of experience with it.

Lemmy.world users can still post on beehaw communities but only other lemmy.world users will be able to see and interact with those posts. You’re probably seeing people post on the same beehaw communities that they subbed to either without realizing that they are defederates or not understanding what that means. It will basically always be better now to find somewhere else to post if you want to reach a wider audience now. So instead of using the beehaw gaming community it would be better to use a lemmy.world one for example. That being said, since lemmy.world is the largest instance at the moment, even posting on a beehaw community and only reaching other lemmy.world users who happen to be subscribed to that defederated beehaw community (or who browse all) will still probably reach a wider audience than someone in beehaw posting to other beehaw users for example.

Apart from everything else that has been mentioned I would add that a very real factor is that every instance to my knowledge has a donation button which cannot be removed without forking the project that goes directly to the devs. Plenty of people in this post are saying things like “Wow, glad they cleared that up! I’ll definitely be giving them money” and very likely don’t have the full context. Assuming Lemmy does continue to grow exponentially it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that these devs will probably receive a large amount of money in donations from people who may not all be okay with supporting them if they were more informed. So spreading the truth about the devs and not taking their pitiful denial as absolute truth is important even if you believe in the project as a whole.

Out of curiosity, what communities are you subscribed to that entirely consist of posts that are marked nsfw that aren’t porn? Not saying you aren’t having that experience but I just can’t think of any communities like that that I’ve come across. Certainly there will be some posts like that but losing entire communities by disabling nsfw in public?

Thanks for the link. It cleared up a slight misunderstanding that I had as well.

You should still be able to view and comment on beehaw as normal so you don’t have to miss those communities. Defederation is a one way street. So it’s just like lemmy.world doesn’t exist as far as beehaw is concerned. We can’t have any impact on their vote counts from their perspective, they won’t see our comments regardless of the instance it’s posted on, they can’t visit any communities from lemmy.world, etc. But unless lemmy.world defederates from beehaw we will still be able to view, vote on, comment on, etc anything from beehaw as normal. It’s just that you are less likely to get any sort of interaction so you are disincentivized from doing so. Technically we could still comment on a beehaw post and anyone from lemmy.world or any other instance that hasn’t defederates with us would still be able to see and reply to that comment.

Edit: for anyone reading this, the truth is somewhere in between. See the link to the post in the comment below mine to get more clarification.