The earliest video games I remember playing were the Magic School Bus CD-ROM video games when I was like 7 or so. We had an ancient PC running Windows 98 or something that was the only computer we had that could still run them, since our other computer ran Linux at the time. (I don't even know if any Windows versions past 98 or maybe Vista can even run them either) Those old PC's were LOUD AF when they booted up; both an old-ass hard-drive and the disk drive would calibrate itself on boot making a bunch of noise. I played the shit out of those old games. It was so much fun coming into my Dad's office and sorting through our stack of CD's to pick out a game and listen to the disk drive spin up as the game loaded, and playing the game while my Dad was working beside me. I also played a lot of flash games at the time, but looking back those old MSB games stand out much more to me.

Defederation doesn't disconnect an instance from the whole network, only specific instances.

The news about beehaw defedrating referred specifically to beehaw.org defederating from shitjustworks and lemmy.world. Only users on those instances cannot see posts from beehaw, and users on beehaw cannot see posts from those instances.
shitjustworks and lemmy.world have not defederated from the fediverse at large, and are still communicating with all major instances other than beehaw.org.
Beehaw.org has also not defederated from kbin.social which is why you can still subscribe to and interact with them on kbin.social.