this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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I'm new to the fediverse, but isn't it sort of shooting themselves in the foot to defederate the biggest instance so far?
Depends on what the goals of the instance admins are.
The entire value proposition of the fediverse is that you can defederate rather than being stuck under the same roof as you would on a centralized platform.
The only people I see complaining about this are on the defederated instances, the Beehaw users seem to be generally happy with the change.
Maybe? I honestly don’t know, but it seems like it would be hard for them to tell…? If I understand things correctly, Beehaw defederates (what a word…) and now no one sees posts / communities from, say, sh.itjust.works, right? So no one really knows what they’re missing if they’re on Beehaw? Please correct me if I’m wrong, as that could easily be the case.
Federation is a two way street, and requires the link to be severed in both directions. The BeeHaw community won't be able to see what's posted by the communities they defederated, but unless those communities also defederated BeeHaw, they'll still be able to see posts and comments from BeeHaw users.
In other words, if BeeHaw users were unhappy with the defederation (and willing to talk about it, of course) we could see them posting about it on kbin for example. I personally haven't seen that though- their community was apparently pretty exclusive before, so it stands to reason they'd be happy with it continuing that way.
No, Beehaw users don't see any content posted by any member of the cutoff instances. These servers might as well not exist, for Beehaw users.
Big instances are a positive in the sense that probably more people are willing to help maintain it
But it's really bad in the sense that, technically, one person has ultimate power over all the communities and users on the instance
Spreading out is the most optimal, so that when one goes down (which has happened many times in the past) another can take its place.
Big == bad, and also partly the reason why these two instances got defederated