If you care about this and have the time, just start grabbing links from hexbear or reddit or your bookmarks and post them to appropriate non-beehaw communities.
Beehaw is a large, active, “no tankies allowed” lemmy instance that has suspiciously defederated from much of the rest of the fediverse, including its largest competitors lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
This potentially threatens the lemmyverse as a system. If Beehaw gains a critical mass of the active lemmy userbase, and continues to defederate from its competitors, it could cause a vicious cycle where everyone goes to Beehaw because “that’s where everyone is.” Alternatively, Beehaw could use the threat of defederation to backseat-moderate other instances and enforce Beehaw politics outside of Beehaw. Either way, federation is defeated if Beehaw gets big enough.
*Lemmy.world is like twice as active as beehaw rn, I think beehaw fucked themselves over with their vetting process
Acting like "federate" and "instance" and fucking "beehaw" are self explanatory terms that everyone has always known is a bit and you can't convince me otherwise
Feel free to ignore this shit lol
“Federate” just means two sites can interact with each other. So if hexbear federates with lemmygrad (which I’ve heard might happen soonish) then lemmygrad users could comment and post here and vice versa, and lemmygrad posts would appear on our feeds and hexbear posts would appear on theirs.
There’s a network of sites that are connected this way, and since reddit killed 3rd party apps around 100k redditors have jumped ship to that network
Thanks for taking the time to break it down! It's def not my thing but now at least I know what the convo is
Instance is website. Federate means talk to. Lemmy means reddit-alternative. Beehaw is a lemmy website doesn't talk to other lemmy websites such as lemmy.world, Hexbear.net, and sh.itjust.works
The only reason I know/understand what federate means in this context is because I remember being told that e-mail is a federated service back in some IT class ages ago lol