TL;DR: You might have more people to talk to, we are now federating openly.
The longer version: Until now, we have been maintaining a list of instances that we are federated with. This was done out of an excess of caution, as it's easier to keep tabs on who you link with.
The downside of this approach is that we haven't been linking with many Fediverse instances that we simply weren't aware of.
We have now switched to open federation and will instead maintain a blocklist, reserved for instances that host shit we really don't want coming across to us (e.g. loli porn).
This of course doesn't change other instances defederating from us, we're scary that way.
Thoughts?
Which is hilarious (ha!) to me. I don't know why Lemmy is so afraid of this instance, but they are!
It is a bit weird, and mostly for imaginary reasons. There's a growing mythology surrounding our little instance.