I assume its still defederated for the same reason they defederated in the first place. Beehaw has the goal of running a strongly moderated instance, and Lemmy.world had too many users for their moderation to keep up with them. They plan to re-federate when they have the mods and mod tools in place to handle that much volume.
Almost all of the data is certainly *somewhere *on the hard drive. It sounds like it was a write to the file system records that lost the record of where they are.
It's not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw's moderation ability.
Go to beehaw.org/instances to see what instances are blocked and which allowed. I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml, which I picked because it was a decent sized instance that was still federated by all the big instances. Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Heh, you can always find shit advice on any social media.
I may have left reddit behind, but I will always carry the poop knife story with me in my heart.
What an honour.
Edit: No tone in text, so to be clear: I'm only half joking. It's genuinely neat that the person who started the biggest meme wave here yet commented on my post about that meme wave while doing something directly related to the topic. You've been a great sport about all of this.
Seriously, this kind of stupid fun is what I was going to miss most.
The trick is to sign up at a well behaved medium-small instance. From over on lemmy.fmhy.ml I can interact with both Beehaw and lemmy.world.