it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn’t aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.

you don’t think it’s nuts for snowden critics to mod privacy subreddits when snowden is the guy behind the main leak that showed how fucked our privacy is?

it’s anti-competitive, which goes against the “no one group is in charge” spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.

The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.

eh, 12/10 is more informative than 2

I think you can see how many instances an instance has defederated from here, in the “Bl” column https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. scroll down to All Lemmy Instances

beehaw has defederated from 352 other lemmy instances, including two of the largest - lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I would be cautious about settling in there.