What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
So what happens to the major communities like technology? Are we creating a new one here, or subscribing to a different instance version?
I join the largest existing alternative - for example for technology the lemmy.ml one is already very large so I just join that.
The problem is that since beehaw was the second largest instance before the reddit wave they had quite large communities already. So they naturally will attract subs. In fact they probably attracted quite a few from the two instances that now can’t access them and probably can’t actually unsub from.
With lenny.ml and other instances able to access them it’s likely they will be the community for at least some topics. Which we won’t be able to access. So it’s not as simple as let them do their own thing and we do ours.
This could lead to people leaving the blocked instances for others with access to the big communities. Till those instances run afoul of beehaws sensibilities. With lemmy as a whole losing users each time.