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Regarding defederated, I think you can still see it, you just can subscribe and interact.

For instance, let's say .beehaw, .ml, and .world are all federated. A .beehaw user (BHU) visits a community hosted on .ml and posts a comment. All federated instances will see this and be able to interact with it. The only difference the BHU has in this instance is that they do not see the downvote counter. As far as I know, they will still see the count total and will still see if this total is a negative number. If the actual count is 7 up and 1 down (because .ml is the community host and has downvotes enabled), the BHU will only see a count of 6 with no explanation. Assuming they never see the count at 7, they will be none the wiser.

In this example, if we only alter the host of the community by changing it to .beehaw, now when .ml and .world users engage with the post and comments, they do not have the option to downvote at all just like the BHU.

If, in this example, the community is hosted on .ml, and a post is created by a .world user (WU), and one hour after creating the post .beehaw defederates from .world, nothing will appear to change immediately. Everything that happened up to the point of defederation is still synchronized and always will be. The only change is how interactions happen from the time defederation occurs. If the BHU replies to a comment from a WU from before defederation it will look completely normal to the BHU. The WU and all other users on the instance will never see the comment reply from the BHU and visa versa from this point forward.

Now let's fast forward a few weeks. The BHU visits a community on .ml and creates a new post. All .beehaw and .ml users see and interact with this post. However, all WU's never see this post or interact with it. Now .ml mods start getting irritated because they keep seeing duplicate posts on popular topics coming from both BHU's and WU's with neither 3rd parties being the wiser. Meanwhile the BHU is part of a smaller community. They may be engaging with their favorite community on .ml, and may notice their posts to the community drop quickly and do not have much engagement. This BHU has no way of knowing that their posts do not have the exposure/visibility/engagement needed to remain visible. If both .ml and .beehaw have a similar number of users in the community that the BHU is posting in, all posts will have a similar number of comments and votes as seen by the BHU. If there are three times as many WU's engaging with this community on .ml, the BHU will not see their votes, posts, or comments. However, the promotional algorithm that controls post visibility priority is hosted on .ml. This means the posts created by the BHU always have (loosely) around a quarter of the engagement of any created by .ml and .world, and therefore always drop from visibility quickly for anyone viewing by Hot or Top(timeframe).

This is why I created my first comment here: The long term ramifications of defederation means it is not really fair or practical to engage heavily with outside communities as a BHU after defederation. Beehaw is now its own thing. It is not attempting to be a competing system with a similar number of users and exponential growth. There is nothing wrong with a BHU participating casually with other federated instances in communities they host, but you should be aware that you may be posting duplicate information and may be excluded from a much larger conversation.

For instance, if a WU makes a comment on a .ml post after defederation, and this makes a giant tree with hundreds of comments, with every other comment coming from users of instances .beehaw is federated with, the BHU will not see any of this because the comment tree starts with a WU's comment. The visiting BHU wonders why this post is at the top of their Top(day) view with 3 random comments and 5 votes while their post has 10 votes and 9 replies and is on page 2.

If you think no one here understands the question you would be wrong.

Sorry if my wording was misleading in any way. I was simply giving an example of a topic on my mind currently that I personally doubt I would get a useful reply if posted in a more general community. The question I chose is really pushing the limits of what pre-strike reddit was capable of using r/CS or r/Linux and these were much larger with a much higher probability of reaching someone that is also currently studying or working on OS schedulers. I have asked similar questions over the last couple of months on reddit and gotten replies from people that posted their own thesis work on the Linux CPU scheduler. I never assume a zero probability statistic for any community, and I am no expert on these things. I barely understand the subject well enough to state the example. I'm self taught after partial disability 9 years ago so I'm actually very insecure about my understanding of all of the subjects mentioned. I need the technical utility of a larger community knowledge base, but truly appreciate a place where I can say something like, "yeah, I'm insecure about it" and know I won't get trolled for it. And a place where a dozen kids are not going to rant about someone really explaining the scope of an issue as best they can, even if a bit wordy.