To be honest, it's not a huge deal. The copyright cartel can easily send dmca requests to your isp just for having text guidelines. Not everyone has the bandwidth or energy to deal with stuff like that.
I just wish this wasn't done at the request of a transphobic racist who just did it to get back at is for getting banned for making transphobic and racist communities in this instance.
One of the most popular instance. This is why federation is necessary and people should create accounts in different servers instead of pulling everyone to one server calling it tge "official" or "main" server
Beehaw's reasons for defederation were completely unrelated to what's happening now. They didn't want the general public to have access to their "safe" community.
there's more to "the general public" besides 2 instances. beehaw defederated from .world and sijw because the mod tooling to handle a huge influx of people isn't ready, and it still isn't ready. (and the rest of their defederations are an off the shelf mastodon blocklist import which all instances should do imo and a few explicitly unmoderated instances. oh and porn i think)
beehaw federates just fine with the instance i'm on, for example.
if they wanted to defederate completely, lemmy does support allowlist federation, and i'm pretty sure their admins know about it.
There's nothing shady here, just kneejerk and protectionist.
Beehaw defederated because they they decided they didn't want to actually moderate their communities. Easier to just screen everyone before letting them join, to weed out people they may potentially disagree with. Ostensibly to filter out hate but only a fool thinks it stops there.