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?
No, you are definitely right. There is a time and place for federation, it’s like a town deciding to incorporate with a larger region. If the town is too early in its infancy, the overall culture and debate will be drowned out by larger servers. But the risk of also not federating the town means that there is a chance of the community dying off. I’m thinking there should at least be a snaller period of considering the effects of opening up your server to the network, and consulting other instance admins about the idea.