A regrettable but completely understandable action. I think this highlights the need for improved moderation tools in Lemmy. Right now the only available option is a sledgehammer of defederation which nobody is happy with. Instances absolutely have the right to protect their members in whatever ways they deem appropriate, this is the benefit of a decentralized platform, but we clearly need more granular options.

It's weird they are touting their sign up process.

I tried to sign up on Beehaw multiple times on multiple days and could never complete the process despite manually typing out answers to their inane questions several times. Some of the times it would just time out. When it would go through, I'd never get a response on my account.

So I ended up on lemmy.world.

And let's be honest, it's not like ChatGPT couldn't generate responses to those questions. In a certain sense, maybe them self-quarentining is a good thing for this and other reasons. I guess that's also part of the point of federation vs a single entity in control of everything.

I don’t get it, if i see a troll, i just block them and move on with life. Beehaw users have the ability to block things themselves no?

They should reverse this decision. This is not good.

Shoot, I kinda liked their Technology and News communities to keep up to date. Those were active enough. I like the whole decentralized nature of Lemmy, but this shows that it is really important to join an instance where you will be the most active on. Sure you can have multiple accounts for each instance, but that is a pain in the ass. Unsubscribed from the Beehaw communities for now.

Their Literature sublemmy was enjoyable. The alternatives are just too small to have discussions at the moment. Let's see if a proper replacement arises.

...and I joined this instance because it federated with more or less everyone. It didn't last long.

kind of disappointing to see, considering they had some very large communities across the feddiverse.

If they were trying to do something like tildes with the small, curated user base, they probably shouldn't have federated at all. this is just going to hold community growth back for the other instances

Sorry to hear that. I enjoyed your communities.

I hope that this doesn't lead to fracturing the way it apparently did on Mastodon, where every instance that federated with a set of known-bad instances was itself added to the list of "known-bad" instances that the main instances ought to de-federate from (or maybe it will have to be that way to keep out the trolls); to put it another way, I hope that whichever side ends up being the more useful one in this split (beehaw.org or lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works) is the one that midwest.social gets to keep federating with, if it comes to that, or else I'll need to bother joining beehaw or sh.itjust.works directly.

(I forget whether I had to go through an involved process to register on midwest.social, but I know it's not one of the instances with open registration.)