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3 years agoI think the biggest problem with de-federalization is that transferring your account to another instance is impossible (or at least obtuse enough that I can’t figure it out). Being able to have your account hosted on an instance that matches your moderation views is good–a lot of beehaw users like the more curated approach–but there needs to be a painless way to migrate to a new instance if the one you’re currently on makes changes that you don’t agree with.
I’m torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But yeah, there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn’t super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what’s going on.
I think Beehaw’s decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They’ve already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.