Now that I (I think) understand federation I was going to unblock the beehaw communities since I should still be able to vote and comment on them but I can’t find them now.
If you mean the list of communities blocked by a server, go to the home page of that server (for example https://lemmy.world/), scroll down all the way to the bottom and find the "Instances" link on the bottom-right of the page.
If you mean those you blocked, go into your user settings, next to the "Settings" tab there's a "Blocks" tab, click it to see what you blocked.
fwiw, you can't actually vote and comment on them, when federation is removed that means every communication from here to there is ignored - posts, comments, votes, user DMs, all of it. We can still see their posts, but what's happening is we're federally pulling their posts over to our side, you're voting and commenting on them, this instance is recording those votes and comments, and when it tries to send them over for federation purposes beehaw rejects them.
That's true, but if you're voting and commenting on those posts, your discussion is all isolated from the OP and the admins and mods who control the post. You're better off grabbing the link/image and posting it outside of a splinter community (Beehaw).
But don't our comments stay in our copy of the thread, so in my case (as a .world user), other users from my instance would see my comments? No one else would, right?
To add to this, yes, other lemmy.world users will see it, but if the post gets deleted over there for beehaw reasons, we wouldn't know or have any say, it'd be gone if beehaw ever went down, OP will never be able to participate in discussions, posts made on beehaw that violate our rules will still make their way over here, and more. It's just not a good fix. Let them be a splinter community and repost the links and images to your home instance or a relevant instance.
In short, the majority of the fediverse was (and probably still is, despite the large influx of redditors?) highly communist in nature, but Beehaw, being predominantly moderated by liberals, were getting so dogpiled for their aggressive anticommunism that they just threw up their hands and started defeferating with any instance that disagreed with them from the left at the drop of a hat. At this point they're probably cut off from 75% or more of the fediverse and I'm sure blissfully ignorant in their little liberal bubble. We're probably not getting them back and to be honest I'm not sure it'd be rewarding to have them back, if their users want proper discourse they can just make an account over here.
I don't think their issue was with them being communists. Most of what I see getting mentioned there is reaction towards anti-LGBT discourse and usernames and the like.
I don't disagree though that they'll probably not end up re-federating. More likely it just ends up reverting back to a fairly small instance as other spaces fill out. I don't think their community policies or goals are scalable or even long-term sustainable. It requires too much moderator intervention and the protocol is just a firehose of information that can't be easily controlled other than just turning it off.
It's gonna see some Galapagos Syndrome as its users become more and more self-contained.
AFAIK there were trolls commenting and harassing beehaw communities from .world and lemmy (I believe also Kbin) lack proper moderation tools to counter that. Supposedly it's only temporarily blocked until those required tools are implemented.