To all the thoughts here already I’m going to ask something that may be wrong and may also be somewhat rude and or hurtful to the person/people it implicitly targets (which isn’t my intention unfortunately) … but which I feel is the tiny elephant in the room:

How much is the beehaw motive to leave the fediverse driven by a small and relatively unchallenged voice from technical person/people in the beehaw team who doesn’t like the fediverse and Lemmy for a bunch of technical reasons and who is certain that they can achieve better some how?

The relevance of this is that I honestly think the fediverse is somewhat plagued by the aggregate effect of the mentality of indy tech people to prefer to do their own thing and to find others’ work and cooperating with it/them insurmountable distasteful. Basically mass NIH.

Which is not problem on its own. Tech people do great things and being motivated to do what they want is pretty fundamental. Hell this is probably half of what’s going on with Lemmy’s development.

But beehaw’s goals are not technical, arguably not at all even to the point of being in spite of technical factors as a “safe space online for the disenfranchised” has intrinsic tension I’d say. And it seems that you’re very reliant on the technical heroes that have kept your instance healthy.

Which means their own technical tastes and motivations might hold too much sway and their promises might be too convincing.

I’m not sure this will help your reasoning, but I figured there was small chance that bringing this might help. The reality may be that the essence of the beehaw project requires fighting the nature of technology.