The Beehaw admins decided they would rather rule their smaller, isolated fiefdom with absolute power than allow external users to take part in their communities.

Unfortunately they made this decision, with no forewarning or discussion with their users, after having established some of the larger communities there (Gaming and Technology especially). So now it splits the lemmyverse at a critical moment of growth.

Imagine the average Redditor’s experience now:

• Checks out the Lemmyverse and sees interesting communities on Beehaw - Gaming and Technology
• Tries to register for Beehaw but receives no response from their manually reviewed registration process (with 4-5 admins lol)
• Registers for lemmy.world as it is a large, popular and well-run instance
• Now finds they can’t view or comment on Beehaw content, and is confused over which users can even see their posts and replies
• Goes back to Reddit

Beehaw has acted very irresponsibly over this, it’s practically an act of sabotage - The Federation Betrayed.

They defederated specifically with my instance (sh.itjust.works), and lemmy.world. What that means is that we can’t access content on Beehaw, they can’t access content on our instances.

If they see this post, my comment will be invisible to them. I can see their comments though, we haven’t defederated with them.

They did this, as far as I understand it, out of a concern about our open user signups, where users don’t need to be approved, they just need to not get banned. I have heard third-hand that there were some instances of hate-speech from users on our instances who quickly got banned (our instances don’t allow that either, but it isn’t pre-emptive), but they don’t want the overhead and extra work for moderators.

I don’t know the why, but the word “defederate” refers to an instance ceasing communication with other instances. That means any posting, commenting, or messaging, no longer works across the connection between that instance and others.

Basically, to everyone on beehaw, the rest of us have gone silent, to us, beehaw has gone silent.