Defederation blocks communication both ways, I believe.

You were into Warhammer at age 4? Man, I couldn’t even read.

Others can correct me if I’m wrong, but PLA the plastic itself is food safe. As in, you can put it in your mouth and it’s fine. The issue comes from the 3d printing process which tends to create small pockets and porous surfaces where microbes can hide and grow once it gets wet, kind of like a sponge. So you could print a single-use fork and eat with it, but don’t reuse it later.

I think an insert for cutlery would be fine since you aren’t going to be getting it wet or putting it in contact with your mouth or food.

I don’t mean to be glib

No worries. I appreciate the time you have taken to explain things. I have watched a few videos and Googled around, but unfortunately most of the results I find are either way too vague (Lemmy is part of the Fediverse. What is that? We don’t know either!) or give the analogy of “It’s like email” and then proceed to basically explain the API gateway thing I was assuming.

I will dig into this some more now that I know what I’m looking for; thank you. I’m hopeful there will be some more/clearer/accurate resources for the Reddit refugees before the current frenzy dies down to help build up the network.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I hope you might be willing to clarify a bit more for me. By “window”, I meant just… having access to a remote community via an API gateway, I guess.

I was under the impression that if I try to subscribe to a remote community hosted on lemmy.world from vlemmy.net, that is simply registering the URL of that community into some local directory in my instance, not duplicating the entire community contents into vlemmy.net. And then when I view a thread in that remote community, I am just retrieving the thread data from the host server at lemmy.world straight to my browser, not loading some local duplicate of the thread from vlemmy.net. Seems like it would get out of sync quickly if we are all reading separate local copies of the original.

So based on your answer, I am still misunderstanding something. What is the purpose of all the duplication then? Is it just for local caching purposes? Does this not needlessly drive up the amount of traffic because each instance is frantically trying to keep up to date with every other instance, rather than just letting each instance handle the requests for its own communities?

Each instance would have to handle the replication and storage of the entire lemmyverse.

Do instances fully replicate and locally store remote subscribed communities? My understanding is they are still solely hosted on the original instance; subscribing just opens a window to the community by making your instance aware it exists.