Depends on the reason for me. I totally get why .world blocked those 3 communities (not a defed I know but still) given the possible legal issues and given the admin isn't a lawyer and can't afford to retain a high powered legal team. Blocking those communities until they have a legal opinion just seems like good sense to me.

The hexbear thing - they're evangelical totalitarians politically. They believe what they believe and everything they talk about revolves around that and they need you to hear it, again and again and again. It's just mentally exhausting dealing with them, especially when a large part of their freely admitted m.o. is brigading/dog-piling.

Being fedded with lemmynsfw didn't bother me, I hardly ever saw anything from it as I rarely feel the need to go on 'All'. I understand there were some anime jailbait issues? That's probably a pretty good reason to defed from an instance.

So, and this is admittedly all from my perspective, I haven't seen any overbearing uses of defedding.

And I think people need to realise defedding is not like banning. On reddit if a sub got banned it was gone. On Lemmy if one instance defeds from another, the other instance is still there. You still have the choice to view it.