The biggest c/gaming was on beehaw, but that's defederated. Maybe nobody else wanted to do it again and just stuck to smalller communities based on particular systems.
When I originally decided to join a lemmy community I signed up with beehaw.org and was accepted. During the reddit apocalypse I also registered for lemmy.world
From my understanding, and someone please treat me like I'm a 5 year old, when I view gaming@beehaw.org via my lemmy.world account I only see old beehaw user posts (from before de-federation) and every lemmy.world user post but only lemmy.world users can see my posts? However, if I view from my beehaw account I can see all posts from lemmy.world and beehaw users but only beehaw users can see my posts?
Does this extend to comments? If I comment on a lemmy.world user's post through my beehaw account... that OP just won't ever see it?
Yes. Beehaw blocks lemmy.world (lw), but not vice versa.
Therefore, a lw user can see all new beehaw content, but any interaction - commenting or voting, will not get back to beehaw, and so it can't federate them to other instances either. So anything a lw user does on beehaw is only visible to other lw users.
Beehaw users can only see lw content from before when beehaw defederated from lw, but should be able to interact with it normally, except for other lw users like in the last paragraph.
A LW user does NOT see new beehaw content. If I visit gaming@beehaw.org on my LW account and sort by new... the newest post is 2d old from an infosec.pub user and the next newest is 4d from a LW user. However, if I visit gaming@beehaw.org from my beehaw account there's at least a dozen+ NEW posts from the last 24 hours, mostly from beehaw users.
But that kind of shows my point, it's confusing. I think the simplest way to think of it (again, very layman understanding that could be wrong). LW users on gaming@beehaw.org can only see posts and comments from non-beehaw users but the vast majority of the users/posts on that channel are from beehaw.
So non-local communities from (one-way) de-federated instances are basically mod-less spaces where users from federated instances can interact with eachother?
E.g. LW users and infosec users can create posts and comments on lemmy.world/c/gaming@beehaw.org, but the mods from beehaw.org/c/gaming have no power and don't even see it, since they are disconnected.
My understanding is that each instance essentially clones posts and comments of other instances that they are federated with. In the case of Beehaw, you'll see the old versions of posts and comments that were cloned to lemmy.world before Beehaw federated, but nothing since. So the users of each defederated instance will only see the respective version cloned on their instance, but not the new comments or posts that have happened since.
Beehaw had concerns about lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because they had open registrations, rather than requiring an application process like they and some other instances do.
The idea is that users being able to join these instances freely meant they couldn't be properly "vetted" to weed out the trolls/racists/harassers/etc., and they didn't believe they had the infrastructure/moderation capability to properly monitor the scale of this new audience themselves.
Part of me gets it, but in hindsight it does seem like the concerns were a bit overblown (at least compared to actual bad instances like exploding heads) and I'm surprised they haven't refederated by now. Beehaw staying defederated from two other major instances is proof that it actually does matter which Lemmy instance you register for, making it harder for new users to figure out which one they should join.
Not sure now, but at the time they had 4 moderators for the whole instance, this while the big Reddit migration was happening so it was a bomb waiting to blowup, also they've stated before that they want/plan to make it a safespace so they are not exactly made for federation since they'll have to end up blocking a lot of instances to achieve that.
It's just a shame that they are overly selective about who they allow to join. When I was looking for a new home after Rexxit, the first place I applied to was Beehaw after seeing it spoken so highly of. My values seem to align with theirs and I thought I wrote a pretty good application stating as much, but they never let me in.
Eh, I'm already here on Lemmy.world, it's really not that bad, and I kinda like having the ability to downvote assholes/racists/spambots when I see them.
Makes sense. Kinda sucks though because the gaming sub being terrible on the other place made the circlejerk and "games" discussion communities more fun. Talking shit about the hive mind in your own personal echo chamber can be fun if you're self aware!