i'm new here but i was on reddit for a long time, and was around during the attempted voat migration.

the main obstacle to a new platform succeeding is that you need a critical mass of content. Of all the people who join, only 10% or so will be actively posting, the rest are just here to consume.

beehaw had a lot of activity, and a few of their subs got to what I consider a critical mass for good discussion. and now they've gone rogue.

I understand the mods had a hard time, but... seriously, this is a huge blow to the fediverse. of all the actions anyone could have done, they've done the most damage to the success of the fediverse, right at a time when growth and activity here is crucial.

I can't help but think the mods could have asked for help moderating. it's a sad sad situation.

i'm personally not going to contribute there anymore, because I want the fediverse as a whole to take off.

Hopefully, we can get some better mod tools into Lemmy soon, which will result in even instances like Beehaw not having to worry about federating with big instances.

~~I think the main current outcome of decision will be that Lemmy users will be hesitant to start any bigger communities on beehaw.org, but this is probably a positive outcome for Beehaw admins in terms of what their goals are.~~ Users can't create communities on Beehaw anyway, so this point is moot.

As for what this means for lemm.ee: based on their reasoning in the post, I think it's entirely possible that they will keep defederating instances which grow beyond a certain point, and lemm.ee might reach that size soon as well. So I would recommend keeping this in mind while you plan where to house your communities etc - if you're interested in what Beehaw has to offer, then it might be best to preemptively go directly to them, and conversely, if you're more interested in the wider federated network, then building communities on instances such as lemm.ee would be the safer bet.

Edit: I posted a comment asking if beehaw.org might defederate lemm.ee in the future if we grow more, their response for now was that they doubt it.

Sad to see, but in the end it will hurt them more than the rest of the fediverse.