Beehaw defederated with instances because they didn’t want to interact with its users. If the users of those instances migrate to another instance en masse, then Beehaw will defederate with that instance as well. Give up on interacting with Beehaw, because they don’t want the same things that people not registered on Beehaw want.
The issue is that due to the different defederation policies, if you want to communicate to the whole fediverse audience, you need to both.
Besides Beehaw, have any other big instances defederated from lemmy.world? I don’t think defederation is a widespread issue.
Anyone on any other instance could reply with the word “downvote” and it would have the same effect. Users on the same instance could do that too, but typically people who join such instances agree with its sentiment.
If it becomes a big enough problem, other instances can de-federate with problematic instances. I don’t like de-federation, but I also don’t like disabling downvotes.
Users who can’t handle downvotes on their own instance clearly can’t be trusted with downvotes elsewhere.
Apollo is more like the wife who was murdered by Reddit, now watching you from heaven, hoping that you find a new social media platform to make you happy.
I agree that this is a grey area, but it could really go either way. Anyway, giant corporations have been abusing individuals who can’t afford lawsuits for decades. Even with precedent on your side, that probably wouldn’t change.
I think there’s still value in using Lemmy, even if you have no interest in federation.
Not anymore (hopefully)
I think most people sign up on whichever instance is most convenient but still want to access all other instances. Those people should still be able to do that, even if one instance has decided to hinder that ability.
IMO the best solution would be to mark those posts when viewed from a de-federated instance. Something like “Note: your comments on this post will only be visible to other users on this instance”.
There are plenty of instances that let you sign up instantly. To achieve that goal, they’d need de-federate with all such instances. Which they can, but I still think that’s a bad idea.