I mean, nothing stops them that I know of. I also think it’s a little pointless

When you go to create an account on beehaw, they have a questionnaire you have to fill out with questions like “what do you plan to contribute to beehaw?” and then one of the 4 admins that run beehaw have to read your answers and then approve or reject.

I don’t blame them for being a small team running a forum and want to keep trolls and spam out, but it sounds like they are trying to have the best of 2 contradictory worlds. with the selective tight group of like minded individuals, but also have their communities reach a large audience and grow interaction. It just unfortunately doesn’t work that way.

But now these 4 admins stumbled into hosting the some of largest popular communities in the fediverse and are struggling to handle the bullcrap that comes with being popular on the internet.

Yeah I also thought it was weird to make a federated Instance and also try to have a human review application process. Sounds kinda silly to me.

This is a very good write up. I think there is a big difference in responsiblilty between community hosting instances and viewing instances, and I believe that we will see issues like this more often as community size is ballooning due to the reddit issues. I do believe, or maybe it’s more of a hope, that over time larger communities will bounce around instances until they land on an instance that can better handle the responsibility of moderation, and eventually we’ll end up with a few large instances that host popular communities, and smaller instance that host more niche communities.

I feel that this is the growing pains stage of Lemmy, and if a few QoL features like community migration get worked in, this platform will stabilize into something great.

The issue they stated wasn’t with other federated communities, but with the users from those federated instances spamming their communities. Beehaw has a strict account policy and only want users they’ve personally vetted commenting and posting in their communities. So in effect they are blocking instances they’ve determined to be problematic by defederating them. At least that’s my understanding of it.