I hear what you are saying. However, the Fediverse intentionally puts a lot of control into the hands of whoever is running the Instance. I, for one, do believe that the Beehaw Admins want Beehaw to be federated with as many Instances as possible. It’s very clear from their Rules and About posts though, that controlling and curating the atmosphere within this Instance is the #1 priority, and access to content for their own members is a high but secondary priority. They also did not want or ask to be such a huge destination for accounts in the Fediverse. One of the reasons I believe there are so many communities here is because Beehaw is an option for folks who want a safe and controlled platform with a broad range of topics, with discussion that fits a certain community culture that Beehaw espouses. Whether those communities are the largest or most active is not a motivating factor in their creation.

Beehaw admins seem to be placing the health of their own communities and members above the “greater good” of the Fediverse, which is precisely the kind of decision the Fediverse empowers them to make. They even said that, if necessary, they would move to a whitelist model for Federation. So no, the system will not “continue to be overwhelmed,” because the Admins have been very clear that they will take steps as drastic as necessary to maintain the community and culture they are attempting to build. That’s an entirely legitimate use for Fediverse Instances, even if it rubs many people (myself included) the wrong way.

For what it’s worth, I have another account on lemmy.dbzer0 and another much smaller Instance which have much more focused communities and open Federation, which embodies a more typical or expected Fediverse user experience. I plan to stick around Lemmy/KBin for the next year or so and watch all this play out. It’s still very early days and these things will work themselves out.

Thanks for the update and for the link to the reasoning – I had completely missed it.

Based on the initial post (only mentioning defederation without linking to the Details), it sounded like the three servers had a falling-out of some sort, but this sounds reasonable. I can appreciate the difficulty of trying to maintain a welcoming environment.

From a user perspective, I think I’m mostly frustrated with the lack of visibility with these changes, specifically trying to keep track of what I do and don’t have access to. I don’t think that’s the responsibility of beehaw to implement, but I might continue to look for solutions

Great summary!

It’s unfortunate that Beehaw started so many communities with such generic names with so few admins. The “beauty” of federation/lemmey/kbin aka “Reddit style” is that communities are supposed to be self-organizing and have their own representation/moderation.

I think the bigger problem is Beehaw decided to launch so many generic names copying Reddit’s busiest and most generic reddits without thinking through the moderationand traffic overhead.

it should be instances have their champion topics and they’re federated or if they have the manpower/technology and funding they can go for the big generic names.

I get why things were defederated - but blaming open registrations is a cop-out (a big lie… you can’t know people by their registration info). It was bad "systems thinking’ that led to an overwhelmed system that will continue to be overwhelmed.

Just avoid echo chambers like Beehaw, exploding-heads and Lemmygrad and you’ll be fine.

I’d love if there was a “meta subreddit” option here in the fediverse so I could group together every instance of say !cats and the eventual hundreds of variants on black cats, or orange cats, or illegally smol cats, into a single easy to view link. This way it would be easy to just and new groups of similar discussion into a single continuous channel. Perhaps this may be a thing once more of the apps start to take off and mature, but until then it’s definitely a thing I’m missing here.