A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
I get why a decentralized model was created; we’ve seen issues pop up with Reddit due to a centralization of power. However, this current implementation of a decentralized system is showing major problems at a fraction of the scale Reddit showed and the devs seem incapable of enacting meaningful change to fix this.
It wasn’t set up to be decentralized power though. The structure was digital fiefdoms with admins and mods on an instance with power over their local communities… and yet difficult to censor content that was posted into it. But you can still get banned from a community or an instance or have an instance get defederated.
The structure doesn’t really solve any of the problems of centralization of power (as shown with Lemmy.world) - its to make it hard to shut down what someone wants to say on some instance’s community if the admin and mods are ok with it. And even if the instance you are on defederates and blocks them, they’re still there and people can sign up there and participate there.
This is Reddit with censorship resistance (no way to completely kick off /r/the_donald from Lemmy if they can stand up their own server) - not reddit with decentralized power.
It is decentralized in that there isn’t one group of admins, but a set of them across the platform who can run their instances as they see fit.
And you can effectively kick off an instance from Lemmy by mass defederation.