Lemmy.world did defederate from exploding-heads, but never defederated from hilariouschaos as far as I know. When hilariouschaos appeared the admin team discussed it and decided to take a wait-and-see approach. First, some of the more problematic exploding-heads users seemed to be gone. Second, by that time Lemmy had more blocking options for users to curate their own feeds, so instance-level defederation seemed less urgent.

We will discuss it again. Personally, it’s been a while since I have peeked over the fence to see what they’re up to over there.

It’s in the “Blocked Instances” section, where it should be.

sh.itjust.works explicitly blocks Threads. They held a vote among the local users: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397

It is odd that threads.net appears on our instances page, while the same is not true for other Lemmy instances which have not blocked Threads. Lemmy.world is federated with Threads by default simply because it is not on our instance block list. I do not believe our instance has done anything special to force a link with Threads. I mentioned it in our admin chat and will update this post if I learn anything.

However, even with threads.net listed on our instances page, Threads does not seem to work with Lemmy. I am able to search and view Mastodon user profiles from lemmy.world, but it does not work for any of the Threads test profiles.

Edit: The lemmy.world database has no records for a person on threads.net. Our best guess is that a Threads user tried to interact with lemmy.world. Perhaps the process got far enough for our instance to recognize threads.net and add it to our instances list, but not far enough to create a record of the user in our DB.

Spoiler alert: the drain is just a straight pipe to a bucket below the counter.