Nah, VLemmy and Lemmy.world are still federated. Check https://vlemmy.net/instances, currently, VLemmy hasn't defederated with anyone yet. As the second biggest instance, lemmy.world just lags out sometimes, check again and it will federate eventually.
yeh we definitely are still in the process of learning how it works. i might even geek out enough to look at building my own instance. i love tinkering with shit like that, and if it doesn't work i'v always got a spare computer
Yeah, it's all open source and has Docker files set up, so it shouldn't be too hard to get your own instance running. I think that's also a generally good solution for people who are annoyed at defederation, a personal instance is automatically federated with every server that uses a blacklist model.