I still don't understand federation and defederation. I know a lot of Japanese-language instances are defederated (or unfederated?) from here because when I look up hashtags in Japanese, only like 1 or 2 instances appear. But one post from misskey dot design appeared on my home feed, and I was able to boost it. The person's account shows zero following/followers, which seems unlikely given how many posts they have.
If I try to follow this account, is that a problem? If the instance was blocked, would this account be completely invisible to me instead? Are blocking and defederating the same?
If somebody could just point me to a good resource? I looked at fedi.tips but it didn't explain what I was looking for.
Hypolite Petovan
•@Evan エヴァン Defederation is blocking at an instance level. If you tried to follow an account on a defederated instance, it would fail because your instance would reject all outgoing or incoming messages.
The number of followers/following are what your instance knows about this account, so it can vary from the actual numbers. Always consult the profile on their home instance to get accurate numbers.
In general, remember that your instance only has a limited view of the whole network. Even if it isn’t defederated, your instance won’t know about another instance if nobody on your instance ever interacted with one of their accounts.