Good riddance

I mean if you want to know how it would effect me it wouldn't. Posts from beehaw don't even come up, flooded out by more active communities, unless I go directly to the beehaw comms. I functionally use it as a seperate website anyways now, if I ever feel like checking it.

I don't really understand your overall goal talk tho. You want to be nice in an intentionally vague way, but you feel like federation is somehow limiting you from achieving this vague state of niceness... Is it just moderation difficulties (not to downplay them) or is something else about leaving the fediverse door open problematic to being nice?

To be blunt the solution to your problems seems to me the same as every single other time beehaw federation is talked about: the community you want to achieve will require many more moderators than a typical community of equivalent size, they will need specialized mod tools, they will need to be high quality skilled highly vetted mods, and you will need exponentially more of them the more users appear on beehaw. Federation doesn't directly stop you from doing any of that, but it does lead to faster growth, which leads to too much work if you aren't constantly adding moderators to match growth.

You should be asking yourself how big you want beehaw to be, and how big of a beehaw you think can be achieved at all.

Sorry I didn't mean to be this rambly when I started writing ignore it if you want

Do what you need to do, but it'll mean less traffic on overall - meaning people who are actively pro-ActivityPub will be switching and using other accounts more. I would probably be out shopping for a different node at that point. But I also fully understand the reasons why one would want to defederate.

Personally I would like to see you have private communities on your instance and public ones and let your users CHOOSE whether they want to how other instances blocked (you could even default to a white list).

Federation is awesome but I also get wanting more private groups

As a relatively new Beehaw user (I deliberately waited for the reddit exodus to subside before applying), I understand the reasoning. The "default" open nature of ActivityPub creates moderation challenges for a "well tended garden" - much more so than a more controlled space. I also understand the software (lemmy) itself is somewhat problematical, both politically and from technical/maintenance perspective.

I wouldn't be against moving - and I'd follow. The Beehaw groups are active and contain lot of good quality discussions, I'd assume that wouldn't change outside fediverse.

I'd be still free to access the fediverse through other kbin/lemmy instances if I wanted to participate and I wouldn't close my Mastodon account just because Beehaw decided to move somewhere else, so I wouldn't personally lose very much - and I would stand to gain a "safe haven" - a more closed discussion forum I could always turn to when the noise of the outside world gets to be too much.

For the sake of everyone moderating Beehaw and our communities, I'd completely understand. Fediverse is a very rowdy bar and as volunteer bartenders, it must be somewhat tiresome for you.

In the long term I'd worry about building a too small echo chamber without the required diversity for Quality Discussions and I'd also worry about "hiding" - it would be harder for fellow disenfranchised cretins to find us - and perhaps we'd lose good members. I know the Beehaw strategy priority is not centered around growth, but nevertheless, some kind of strategy would have to be devised to monitoring the long term health and diversity of the community.

You're smaller and weaker defederated. The fact that you chose to post this on lemmy.ml rather than beehaw clearly proves that.

You pop in here and ask the community if we would be sad if you left? You're either phishing for a reason to leave by garnishing negative sentiment, further driving your "parishioners" to WANT defederation, or you are wanting to tarnish Lemmy as a platform, or both. Various sects of Christianity do this manipulative shit all the time. They force their flock to spread the word knowing full well they will face negativity -- no one likes to be solicited to -- and come crying to the church about their treatment, where the church comforts them and reinforces why only they can provide safety and warmth. It's cult tactics.

You don't want to know if you should defederate from the rest of us, you want to spread doubt in the platform and wall yourselves off to the world that doesn't conform to your views. You talk about negative aspects of Lemmy without offering any specifics and/or providing solutions to things you find problematic. To me, that's a red flag for someone wanting attention for a decision they already made. There's a sarcastic reply to that, I believe it's "bye Felicia."

It'd be a shame imo but end of the day your choice.

Late Reply: This is going to sound harsh but it's true. I wouldn't miss it. If Beehaw disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn't even notice, and I'm sure that would be the case for many other people here. The problem is that because Beehaw has defederated so aggressively from the largest instances and shut its doors to new users, and people just moved on, or didn't notice or care. I spent most of my first days on Lemmy.world and consequently didn't see a majority of the content from Beehaw, but I did see many upset users who had to Migrate from Beehaw due to the defederations since most of the content and communities they wanted access to wasn't available to them on Beehaw.

Since Beehaw didn't (and still doesn't) have community creation enabled it never really had niche communities like other instances did, it is rather forgettable because of that, what most people will remember it for though is the defederations and having to migrate accounts to not be cut off from the rest of the fediverse.

At least two communities I use are on Beehaw, but I wouldn't be super affected.

I'm not sure I understand where you guys are planning to be moving on to- just a website? I will miss beehaw for sure, I appreciate the technology and gaming communities there which I follow. I've been blissfully oblivious to any toxicity either from beehaw or towards beehaw. But you must do what your instance prefers first and foremost.

Indifferent