I'm also @savvywolf@beehaw.org and @savvywolf@mastodon.scot
Actually started playing this for the first time a few days ago! Such a good game, very charming art style, and the mechanics and ideas are amazing. Certainly a game to go into blind, and just enjoy the experience.
I also did not realise it was secretly a soulslike, but it never really felt that punishing (as someone who never got past the first real boss of Elden Ring).
From a technical standpoint, there is no real difference, it comes down to how the instance owner feels it's best to run the server.
Ultimately, instances (or at least the ones most people want to join) want to keep rulebreakers, trolls and spam out. There are two main ways of doing this:
Of course, there is a lot of debate as to which of these methods are better (beehaw, for example, fundamentally doesn't think a reactive approach can work at all), which causes tension between some instances.
This tension can rise to a point where one instance "defederates" from another, meaning they stop talking to each other and you can't interact with one if you have an account with the other.
In terms of Lemmy instances, assuming the feddit.de map is up to date, only beehaw, tucson.social and toons.zone have defederated. The first two presumably because of open signups.
However, afaik, Kbin doesn't publish it's blocklist, and the timing does make sense (last posts seem to be about 2-3 days ago), so it's possible they have blocked it.
On the other hand, kbin.social had pretty much always had issues federating since the "migration", so it could just be under load.
Oh, did they make it easier in a patch sometime after release?
Out of interest, since Chromium is open source, is there anything stopping Opera, Edge, Brave, etc. just mantaining support for the old manifest? Like, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal for anything other than Chrome and Chromium.
You can actually see this here; beehaw recently blocked lemmy.world , so as far as Beehaw is aware, lemmy.world "doesn't exist".
As you can see, old posts remain on the instance (unless the admins go and remove them), but new posts don't get received. I think you might be able to post on Beehaw's mirror, but they won't get shared with any other instances.
Of course, this is all subject to change in some future Lemmy version, because this sort of thing can be confusing and counter intuitive.
https://sub.rehab/ Is also useful, if you want to look up by subreddit.