General Discussion

I know that many people don't like their defederation decision but I think they did it in good faith. And they did state they want to refederate with the two instances once the mod tools are in place.

For kbin, they did mention the reasoning behind.

To be clear there are problematic users on nearly every instance. I’ve had to moderate quite a few kbin users, but it’s not standing out from the pack as a particularly problematic place as of this moment.

As for lemmy.ml, I have a stupid theory that since the signup is closed, those spammers cannot get accounts over there.

Unpopular opinion but I don't think refederation with beehaw.org should be on the table. They loved the concept of federation when they needed users, and then once they've grown enough they said okay now we're gonna be a closed island and the other peasants need to rise to our standards before we refederate with them. The moderation excuse is obviously not sincere as users could have easily volunteered to moderate.

No matter how fancy their writing is (and there was indeed lots of it, why try too hard to justify the decision?), I think the trust has been broken. Why would I comment on their threads ever again and risk having my content "locked" in their instance if they go on another ego trip and defederate again?

I say leave them to themselves. I tried applying for an account there, and was rejected. I guess they must not be hurting for new members. You have to wonder if they'll run out of people as other communities/magazines continue to grow without them. They might find their own members leaving in favor of those larger communities.