I need a damn explain it to me like I'm five for how all this works. My brain can wrapped it up into neighborhoods or space fleets but the in an out communications are the part I'm missing.
The Fediverse is like a group of interconnected neighborhoods, each representing a different social platform or community. Just as you might have neighbors on your street who interact and share things over time, these communities can communicate and exchange ideas. These neighborhoods may differ in size or focus, but they all exist within a larger universe - just like planets orbiting around a sun. In this case, think of our star system as something like Friendica (the first step towards the modern fediverse) and Diaspora* (itself originally based on Friendica). And just as there might be traffic or communication issues between planetary systems, there could be friction between distinct Fediverse networks. But ultimately, we’re still talking about a united whole here! Finally, imagine spaceships zipping back and forth through space linking up these distinct points of interest - say hello to the protocols bridging connections between decentralized nodes known as “federation” today. It’s all connected!
IMO that's still better than other sites, where they don't federate at all.
On Reddit, you can screencap something, and paste a static image. You can't see the comments underneath at all.
I expect instances that don't fully federate will grow slower, so it won't matter, most content will be on instances that are open to fully connecting with others.
From my understanding, posts on beehaw won't populate on defederated instances. And defederated instance posts wont show on beehaw. There's also no requests sent or received from beehaw to update the beehaw posts with defederated data.
Defederated instance users can still go to posts directly on beehaw and they might be able to comment, but no one on beehaw will see it. It's basically "read-only" for defederated instances.