Here is my view/reaction as a Beehaw user. I am not an admin or mod, just a regular user. I don't want this to seem like an attack, but know ahead of time that I disagree with a lot of what you said.

Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole.

How so? It is not obvious to me, and some examples would be great.

The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

As a personal opinion, the communities Beehaw defederated from are communities I don't want to interact with. This is not a net negative for me.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

Do you have evidence of this? It is a pretty bold claim and if it is so impactful, there should be evidence. As side note, Beehaw's goals (from a user perspective mind you, I am not speaking for the admins or mods) are not exponential user growth, but quality community. If users are turned off by the fact Beehaw is pro defederation with communities that are a large source of trolls or hate (not saying SJW is one of those), then Beehaw isn't the right community anyhow.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.

I like the removal of the downvote. It makes for a more positive community, and because Beehaw has an active mod/admin team we don't tend to have issues that are not taken care of fairly quickly.

The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.

To me, the issue is that this relies on a lot of other large communities to moderate users, and more often than not that is more difficult than it sounds for the good ones, or non-existent in the crappy ones. Especially with the Lemmy devs resistant to adding good moderation tools.

But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW),

Again, Beehaw's focus is quality over quantity. Honestly this felt like it was meant to be an insult, but in the grand scheme of things doesn't have much relevance to me

you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Defederation is the most extreme, but if so much bad stuff is coming from a single source that is not properly moderated, it seems like the most logical to me. I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw's relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works.

Does sh.itjust.works still have open sign ups? Then I don't think a mistake was made nor should the admins refederate.

I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I am not privy to the inner workings of Beehaw, but I know they are focusing on moving to a new platform, so this seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort for the small team that is Beehaw.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase.

This is a difference of philosophy (at least for Beehaw, hexbear is a different story/issue). Beehaw's focus on it's userbase is why I am here in the first place. The greater fediverse isn't my concern, and it is not the admins responsibility.

This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

I think when Beehaw moves platforms, things may change. Better tools might allow for a more open relationship. That being said, Lemmy has been hostile to Beehaw (when they tried to reach out the Lemmy devs to petition for better mod tools, they were told in no uncertain terms they were welcome to GTFO). I know Lemmy isn't the whole fediverse, but putting in a bunch of effort on a platform Beehaw is leaving seems silly.

Again, these are just my thoughts as a Beehaw user, but to me the issues you bring up are not issues for me at all, and in a lot of cases are actual boons.