in summer 2023, when I moved here from reddit, the lemmy instance beehaw.org was extremely divisive. they wanted to create a website according to certain rules rather than a free for all. some people were saying it would be the end of the threadiverse before it even began.
since that time, there have been various other intrinsic and extrinsic threats. I do not see much panicking about beehaw. did the threadiverse survive beehaw? or is this only a shell of what we might have had otherwise?
The point of the fediverse is the federation. It’s like going to a public meet up, and getting a handful of people to join your private meet up. They used the fediverse to help them grow, and once they were self sufficient they cut the rest of the community off.
Beehaw was here long before the fediverse was popular and long before the reddit disaster that sent people rushing to lemmy. Before reddit happened, they were one of the few active and successful lemmy instances that wasn’t basically just a lone admin hosting a personal instance.
They didn’t “use the fediverse to help them grow”. They helped the fediverse grow when hardly anyone else was around.
Federation is just a protocol or a shared language so that other activitypub-federated services can act as a user on that instance. Most activitypub software include the ability to block instances for any particular reason. Further, most activitypub software include the ability to host private instances. Nothing about this is against how federation or the fediverse works. It could be considered a dick move, but I think that refers more to federetiquette than the fediverse itself.
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hmm, well kids that’s access controls and networking for ya! use it to your own advantage. besides, i doubt any federettiquite has beem established. remember you can always start your own instance with your own friends and block everyone else out. thre’s lno reason not to.