At least for your instance, or for looking one instance at a time, you can see which instances they federate and defederate with by scrolling to the bottom and clicking “instances”
Or go to the url of the form “<instance domain>/instances”
I saw that, but I thought beehaw still defederated from Lemmy world and shit just works… They have them listed as federated
You need to be on a web browser, and at the instance you want to check. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and click instances. That example is from your home instance.
I’m no expert here, but so far the only way I’ve seen is to go to /instances from whatever server you inquiring about.
Such as, lemme.ee/instances
It’s cumbersome in that you have to scroll past a massive list of federated instances (across the whole fediverse, not just lemmy), but you’ll eventually get to the list of defederated instances at the bottom.
I’ve been curious myself tho, if there’s a way to directly see what/if any instances have defederated from yours.
You can look at the /instances page for any instance you want.
I’ve seen this site suggested in posts like this:
spoiler
I’m using the spoiler tag because elsewhere I’ve seen this warning about the site:
run by people from kiwifarms (a known bad actor on the fediverse).
I’m unfamiliar with “kiwifarms” but the site currently does has some offensive language at the bottom that’s associated with 4chan, so be warned.
That said, it appears to be the only site currently available to see which instances in the fediverse have blocked/defederated your instance. (The reverse of
<instance domain>/instances, which only shows which instances your instance has blocked/defederated.)They have a habit of doxing trans people for simply existing on the Internet. Also they’ve been responsible for several people being swatted. They were so awful that Cloudflare finally stopped having anything to do with them. Things have to be really bad for Cloudflare to nope out, it’s a short list also containing the Daily Stormer and 8chan.
I’m still trying to understand all this. I thought all instances “see” (federate) each other. If they can defederate (block) others from seeing an instance, isn’t that going to make discovery a problem? Wouldn’t that also mean I need to create a new account just to see that instance?
Defederating only affects your instance and the other one, so it only affects users on your instance and on the other one (who cannot see content on your own). To get around it requires another account on an instance that has not defederated.
Even aside from differences in opinions, there are very valid reasons for defederating. Some places do not control spam bots, for example.
Most instances default to federating with any instance they find out about, but there is also the ability to make this a whitelist instead and only federate with specific servers.
For most instances the default stance is to federate everything, and defederate as last resort. Defederatipon isn’t used just because you disagree with someone’s taste in memes. It’s used to isolate servers that are doing something you consider unhealthy for your community. A common example is unmoderated hate speech. It’s better to defederate the problem server than to expose your own users and risk an exodus. And then if/when the instance fixes the problem that caused the defederation, you can refederate them.
