Beehaw had been around for a few years before lemmy.world launched. They have a specific sort of space they want to create, so good for them for being able to maintain it.
Yeah, that post gives the answer better than anything else. I was going to chime in with a rough explanation off of memory, but the actual post is way better.
I’m surprised they haven’t re-federated by now. I kind of got the impression it would be temporary during the main Reddit migration but I guess not. I really like the beehaw community but it definitely seems inconvenient to not be able to access all of those bigger communities on world and shjw.
I have noticed that a lot of the most irritating and vocal reactionaries come from those two instances, and it's not improving much. It makes sense - this is an alternative to reddit and the people most likely to leave reddit will include a large number of people who get banned a lot.
If they're reactionaries, they're not going to have many instances that are for them specifically - because those instances get defedded - so they will tend to go for the open instances. So those instances get a lot of the worst people.
And if their goal is growth at the expense of quality, then they won't fix it. They'll just get worse. The reasons beehaw defederated haven't changed.
When Reddit announced their API thing, I moved to beehaw (LW didn't exist) and it was cool! Then they defederated from instance one by one... So I opened an account on LW.
Been a while, but as far as I can recall, SJW and LW are the two largest instances and the decision was due to limitations with Lemmy's moderation tools and wanting to provide a safe space for their userbase (the latter being their primary mission). BH doesn't have a huge admin/mod team, so they chose to limit federation with some of the larger instances. I also think I remember reading that federation was never really Beehaw's goal and is more a side effect of the platform (Lemmy) they chose to run for their project.
May be a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe that's the gist of it.
Not sure them just defederating to stay small and to be able to handle all the reports, if I recall correctly, is the same thing as making arbitrary decisions in order to feel powerful.
im sure you can find more info on beehaw, but really they just wanted to avoid a metric tonne of negative influencing (political or otherwise) and drama.
part of what pushed me into running a public instance was their closed stance. i appreciated their genial camaraderie, but i dont like being closed off.
Last I heard they want to switch to another platform, and don't consider it worth upgrading to 0.19 because they're leaving soon so it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
This is pure guesswork on my part, but they could be waiting for Sublinks (a Lemmy-compatible backend) to get up to speed before switching to that. They say that the new platform is "compatible with all Lemmy apps", and Sublinks is the only project I know of that fits that criteria.
So they create a Lemmy instance.....and then decide they don't like Lemmy users. So they defederate. Then they decide THATS not enough, so they're trying to leave Lemmy entirely, but stay IN the fediverse.......but still defederated.