Unfortunately, there are some cases of direct linking occurring. Fortunately, it's mostly caught by moderators and admins and removed. Defederating is certainly an extreme case, and it's absolutely not something we're intending to do. It would be an absolutely extreme scenario for that to occur in this case.
Shouldn’t we defederate .world?
There is no appetite to defederate from lemmy.world. I know their some of their decisions have been unpopular with some users, but they are by far the largest Lemmy instance, and that puts a target on them. Like us, they are a bunch of volunteers trying their best to run a large community and that will sometimes mean making decisions they probably aren't keen of themselves.
We have not blocked anything proactively.
For us, it was a priority to get some open communication out on this issue, due to any uncertainty caused my Lemmy.world's actions.