/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!
It certainly doesn’t have more. Hexbear came from r/chapotraphouse being banned, after all.
But hexbear has 4.4 million comments, whereas .world has 4 million comments. By not federating, they’ve effectively removed more comments from their member’s feeds than .world has ever had on its own servers. That’s pretty huge.
I didn’t say the censorship is problematic? In fact, I completely support it.
I’m just pointing out that defederation functions as censorship. Lemmy.world refused to federate with hexbear.net and that was when I moved to lemmy.ml - the power of the fediverse is that I was able to move to a different instance and I can interact with both communities. They engaged in censorship that I didn’t like, so I moved. It works!
Defederation is censorship. It’s part of the platform.
Don’t get me wrong, I support defederating from shitty instances, but it’s still a censor deciding what members see.
And that’s fine.
But it’s also censorship.