With federation, the content is shared between servers, that’s the act of federation. It downloads the posts from the other instance. So it would then be stored on lemmy.world, the only way to stop that is to defederate. The mobile apps mostly solve this problem as you can view content from lemmy.world and choose to add other instances, but the browser version isn’t setup to work that way, so it’s less than perfect, but it’s supposed to be easy for this content to exist all on its own and only show to other users in a single place when they want that. So if the admin team is afraid the largest community on a small and growing platform won’t have the means to fight a legal battle no matter if it is legal or not (I’ve been hearing a lot of legals), I get their reaction. hell reddit could easily target and crush Lemmy.world in court if they wanted to kill the platform. It isn’t much work as unfortunate as it is to go to that instance for that content
I wonder if that’s the point, I mean it probably is abit much to be the biggest name and have a lot of people attempting to join. That was the whole goal was small narrow focus instances, so by intentionally provoking members that tend to be more techy and understand how to change instances, they’re pushing them to help grow other instances and help limit flow into lemmy.world.
Or not, I wonder if soon it’ll make sense if instances become more democratic and allow member voting (that have been apart of the server for some time) for decisions like this, people will be mad either way (especially with only two options of fed or defed) but letting it be clear that the people are ok with it.