It often works, but sometimes fails in very quiet ways. https://pawb.social/post/8422352 and https://yiffit.net/post/8267386 are the same mealtime video post (Technology connections kettle), but very different comment counts. I usually see it as posts or communities that just stop showing up even though nothing changes. The other day I played with the stories community here from a remote community, but nothing showed up until I made a comment on a post that didn’t show up initially.
yea federation can be weird sometimes.
That’s if you block an instance at the user level. If it’s blocked at the instance level, then you don’t see anything at all. For example, my instance is defederated from hexbear, so I don’t see communities, posts, comments, upvotes, user profiles, or anything else from that instance
I’m just used to the receiving end and know I can see posts from users on instances that have defederated from us, just nothing hosted on the instance itself.