I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
This is not quite true. All content from that instance that was interacted with, subbed communities, commented or upvoted posts get copied to the local instance. If the local instance defederated the bad instance, the copied content from the bad instance stays and is visible, communities, posts, all of it. It simply is no longer receiving new stuff from the bad instance. Lemmy.world is defederated from Beehaw.org. You can still see Beehaw’s communities from Lemmy.world but they don’t have any updates from Beehaw since the defederation.
Lemmy instance admins can purge other communities, users, and whatnot. This+defederation will remove them from their instances entirely