I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.

I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.

beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and “high quality” community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.

I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.

I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this… This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.