I'm new to fediverse and lemmy stuff and when I made my account, I didn't know this but I saw a yt video today which showed that the instance I've registered with, can block another instance and I cannot interact with that instance as well. Is that true? That seems like more control over what I see than reddit itself. I don't want to be controlled by someone else's ideologies and opinions. And I hope that's not the case. I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding something but this is important to me
Yes and no. The way I've seen it described is "Freedom of speech, freedom to filter".
We come from a place where all of the rules about what can be said on Facebook come from zuck (and a hidden team of moderators, accountable to no one). The final say about what can be posted to reddit comes from /u/spez, and worst of all, all the rules about what can be said on Twitter come from Musk.
Here, yes. In theory, @Pyarra technically CAN defederate entire communities on a whim. His/her ball, his/her rules. But the neat part is you get to PICK your Zuckerberg here. If @Pyarra is too tyrannical, you can just go be a member of lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, knin.social, etc. and join all the same communities and talk with all the same people.
In practice, any time the issue of defederating an instance came up, /u/Pyarra was SUPER transparent about what they were considering and why, and we all talked it out. They don't HAVE to do that, but they have. It' find this to be a very good instance.
Footnote: beehaw.org is a large instance that has kindness and hard moderation built into its DNA. Right after the first wave of refugees arrived, they defederated major instances because the small mod team couldn't keep up with trolls. People who took issue with this left, and people who liked it stayed. In my opinion, this is an example of the system working. Beehaw's not for everybody, but I'm glad it's there.