This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.
Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.
Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?
I’ve recently made a blog post about this subject if you’d like to read it : https://lionir.ca/posts/open-limitless-federation/
That said, defederation is a tool like any to build site culture and moderate spaces. If the only thing we can have are awful spaces because we should not curate our own community, we’d be better off not federating at all. Thankfully, most admins understand this and do take actions when necessary.
The main problem I personally have with defederation is that it can make it very difficult to discover and participate in already niche communities.
Sure, being open to everyone comes with its problems. But a large user base that’s able to connect with each other is essential to these niche communities. Let’s say I had an interest in Virtual Boy homebrew development. Say someone created a community for this on lemmy.world, I would obviously want to join this one instead of creating my own, because we’d likely already only be a handful of people. Now a lot of instances start defederating from lemmy.world for whatever reason(s) (and sure, there are likely good reasons to do so). This would likely completely kill such a niche community. Sure, you could try and coordinate moving the community to a different instance, but finding an instance that isn’t defederated from any of each users’ home instances will be hard if defederation becomes so commonplace. Users could also all create an account on that new instance, but most users probably don’t want to create dozens of accounts because each of their communities happens to be on a different instance.
I already created accounts on multiple instances because the instance I was using either defededated from communities I wanted to interact with, or other instances with communities I wanted to interact with defederated with my home instance. I don’t even care about my accounts as such (content history, upvote count or whatever), and transferring subscribed communities (and saved posts/comments) is done with a simple script within minutes or even seconds, but having to find a new instance every few weeks because instances start defederating from one another can be cumbersome (and again, it will eventually lead to shrunk niche communities).
If I see a user or community that I don’t want to interact with, I simply block it and move on.
“a lot of instances start defederating with Lemmy world”?
Besides beehaw, which ones are you talking about?
That was just part of my theoretical example of what would be my “horror” scenario. I don’t know which instances defederate with lemmy.world off the top of my head.