My understanding was that they blocked 2 specific instances, which people are referring to as “defederating” and “having a closed system,” but my understanding is that all other Lemmy and kbin instances can still interact with Beehaw and vice versa, so isn’t Beehaw technically still federated, they just blocked two instances which is something I would expect federated servers to be allowed to do? And are people boycotting Beehaw? Does that involve not interacting with any beehaw server, or does that mean people are just not having accounts in a Beehaw server?
Edit: and I’m seeing posts now suggesting that kbin is defederating? What’s up with that?
Behaw was simply first to recognize a problem, massive influx of bot accounts. There are some instances where Beehaw defederated due to content, most notably lemmygrad which is a pro Marxist site, but most of the others are due to bot abuse.
Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world because they were not using strict enough options for the account creation process. Right now there’s three settings admins can enable or disable for user authentication, captcha, email, and application. Lemmy.world was using only one.
There’s a bit of flux now since the recently released 0.18.0 version of Lemmy has the captcha method temporarily disabled due do migration away from web sockets, but that should be resolved in 0.18.1. There’s going to be some turmoil in federation until things get worked out. The bot problem is a biggie.
In the meantime if you really want to interact with a Beehaw community, log onto an instance that is not blocked (go to bewhaw.org and select Instances link bottom of page). Mine is not. Otherwise admins can petition other admins for re-federation. I would expect lemmy.world to get things worked out with Beehaw at some point, but you could mention it to an admin there and possibly generate some priority.