I know probably not the perfect place to post this but want to get the discussion started and don’t know enough to be scared or not: because of the decentralization of Lemmy, is it extremely vulnerable to malicious/ad bots, astroturfing, spam and such?
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You created an account on the lemmy.world instance, but there are a ton of other instances out there.
Defederation explanation as far as I understand the topic: By default all instances talk with each other and publish their communities (The federation part). But if an instance decides to defederate from another, it will block the second instance from getting interacting with communities on the first instance. So the users of instance 2 can’t post on instance 1.
Federation is like email. Maybe you signed up for email at gmail, and that’s the server your account lives on, but you can still email people with @yahoo or @hotmail accounts, even though their accounts are on different servers.
It’s like Reddit and email had a baby.
My understanding is there isn’t one Lemmy. There are lots of instances, but they all talk to each other. I.e. they share the posts and comments their users make. If an instance becomes problematic then other instances will choose to stop receiving updates from them. So users of the bad instance can still see the content and comment on it, but other users won’t see the content from those users.