Defederation is weird and I don’t fully understand it. For example, the community will still exist on a server after defederation, and people can still post to it (albeit now there’s no moderation, and that’s a separate problem). Maybe feddit is pulling in posts from users outside of dbzer0, linking it to the orphaned comm, and populating the posts that way.

Feddit and dbzer0 have (mutually?) defederated, so you’ll only see posts there from your own instance users.

What I get out of self hosting services: Full control of my data and something to tinker with when the fancy strikes.

Graphs? Monitors? Failover? I get enough of that shit at work. If it’s down then whatever: I’ll fix it when the inconvenience is too great to ignore. External users? I only invite people who understand that this is my hobby, not my job.