I’m torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn’t super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what’s going on.
I think Beehaw’s decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They’ve already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.
Didn’t Fox News literally just do that with Dominion? Open sourced software is at least verifiable by independent parties and wouldn’t require a long $800 million lawsuit to work through.