It often works, but sometimes fails in very quiet ways. https://pawb.social/post/8422352 and https://yiffit.net/post/8267386 are the same mealtime video post (Technology connections kettle), but very different comment counts. I usually see it as posts or communities that just stop showing up even though nothing changes. The other day I played with the stories community here from a remote community, but nothing showed up until I made a comment on a post that didn’t show up initially.
yea federation can be weird sometimes.
I’m just used to the receiving end and know I can see posts from users on instances that have defederated from us, just nothing hosted on the instance itself.