I already had to intentionally do that because Beehaw decided to defederate from the instance where all my subscriptions are.

Wait, what? Beehaw is defederated? I still see lots of post from Beehaw on my feed.

Federation is a two-way connection. Beehaw shut off the incoming stream, essentially, so anyone commenting or posting on spaces from that instance will not be seen by users logged into Beehaw. However, the outgoing stream is still active so anything posted there that you subscribe to or visit from another instance can still be seen. Users on other instances can even comment in those threads, but users on Beehaw would not see those comments.

For me it helps to think of the instance you are logged into as the place you trust the most. Content from other sources can always come in, but you can choose to simply not see things you don't want. This is a fundamental part of how the Fediverse works, for better or worse.

Cooool, I was wondering this. I had been curious if it was 1 party or 2 party federation; so someone can defederate, but it doesn't "block" receipt of content, only the interaction with the blocked platform?

I believe that instances can independently choose whether to accept incoming or allow outgoing data, so there are multiple possible combinations.