What does it mean to defederate?

It’s like federating, but not.

Thanks for coming.

I jest.

A lot of people compare the fediverse to emails. Different domains can all talk to each other.

Imagine if there was an email service Jeffrey Epstein made for him and his buddies; LolitaMail.

It should go without saying every email service should block all LolitaMail communications.

That’s what defederating is.

I thought federalization was about not having an owner of a platform. Decentralization. I have some reading to do

not really, every Lemmy instance has an owner…

What federation is is that every Lemmy instance gets some of its data not just from its users, but also from other Lemmy instances. You can think of each Lemmy instance as one mini-reddit, in principle there is no difference between reddit and one single Lemmy instance. Federation means that Lemmy instances copy their data from/to each other so that you can talk to users who use other ones too.