Nature knows how to solve this problem.

I suppose it could still be done as a read-only display of content …

If the content is hyperlinks / torrent links to copyrighted content, then even a read-only copy is illegal. Lemmy (by virtue of ActivityPub) isn’t designed to access stuff remotely - the closest it could probably come would be to have links to the posts on the remote community, though adding a level of indirection is probably not enough to become legal.

If you want to do illegal stuff on the internet, you need to use services that are hosted where it isn’t illegal. People yelling about freedom doesn’t change the fact that admins aren’t willing to go to jail for your warez.

You are allowed to discuss piracy. You aren’t allowed to facilitate piracy (I.e. providing links to pirated content). It is illegal in the country where this instance is hosted.

Is there a place for something in between de-federated and federated?

That’s what blocking a community is - if the instance does not allow anyone to subscribe to a community, the content from that community will not be mirrored locally.

Is there not some kind of ‘gray-list’ that would allow risky content to stay accessible through home instances but behave more as a direct link

The indirect approach you describe isn’t compatible with the underlying ActivityPub protocol. My understanding is that all communities are effectively local, even when their home is on a different instance. Federation just allows modification of the “local” content by another instance.

(That is not to say that technology@lemmy.world is the same community as technology@lemmy.ml, rather that the two communities are accessed in the same way by the UI)

Defederating cuts off the whole instance. They just blocked those three piracy communities as far as I understand.

Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.

A strength and a weakness. The strength, as you say, is being able to move to a different instance. However, the weakness is that Lemmy (the software) requires each instance to keep a copy of every federated post for its users to interact with. This means they have to host (and be legally liable for) data that they can’t police beyond blocking the community / instance.

This is the solution. Communities need to congregate on smaller, like-minded instances. It makes sense to concentrate users on large instances, but communities should be spread out.

Not really - it isn’t prediction, it is early detection. Interpretive AI (finding and interpreting patterns) is way ahead of generative AI.

Like I said - there is a small vocal group who few that Lemmy as a whole should be boycotted due to the developers’ political views.

You will find that very often the scams, advice, self-help, doctrine, etc that draw these populations have one thing in common: if whatever it is doesn’t work, it is because you are doing it wrong, not because the guidance is bad. That’s why conservatives will defend the tax rates of people who have 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than they do - they believe that it is their own fault they aren’t rich, and that anyone can become rich if they just try hard enough. It is why religious conservatives will still attack birth control in the face of their own kids having unwanted pregnancies. It is why natural medicine people will defend their practices even after it sends them to the hospital. They are more willing to believe that they themselves are at fault than the principles they believe in.

The Protestant Work Ethic equated Christian values with material success.

I think having a 300 year life span would tend to select for darker skin and possibly other traits that would better survive 300 years of exposure - enough to distinguish it from any existing ethnicity.

Why would a Kbin user want to speak to you, a Lemmy user?

Some people are excessively sensitive to software developer political views.

Lemmy isn’t Kbin and Kbin isn’t Lemmy. Both are software participants in the fediverse. It is like saying nginx isn’t Apache: of course isn’t, but that doesn’t make them any less web servers.

It is a joke. OC said Bernie wasn’t stuck in the 50s, and I’m arguing that he’s still a 60s hippie. No sense of humor around here.

His mindset is stuck in the 60s, but whether or not that’s a good thing is a different debate.

It is fairly common among Catholics. I’ve known some fairly progressive Catholics who are Republicans because abortion. Now, that isn’t to say that a good number haven’t bought into the divisive rhetoric and gone full maga, but that’s not where they started.

It is a wedge issue that has locked a portion of the population who are single issue voters into being Republicans despite literally all their other beliefs. That is basically what all the non-financial planks of the Republican platform have in common.

While I agree there should be functionality to propagate changes to a community between instances when the host is offline, there is no practical way to share administrative control of a community. Any decision by an administrator to sanction a community or defederate an instance will just result in exactly the fragmentation you fear.

The real solution is for small groups of communities with similar interests to gather on separate instances with few or no users. Meanwhile, other instances gather users with few or no local communities. This maximizes the benefits of cacheing community content while minimizing the impact of defederation. If a community host can no longer be maintained by its owner, that ownership can be easily transferred without transferring the burden of hosting hundreds of communities or supporting user logins.