Excellent point. Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, even email lists all solved this problem decades ago. And they mostly worked quite well. The web based generation was a step backwards in many ways.

Meh, beehaw seemed promising until they unilaterally decided to cut off large parts of lemmy. I get why, but I moved to another server because I want to control my own experience

Same. Also all my silly alt accounts. Used power delete to edit them all first so hopefully my footprint is several thousands of “u/spez, you suck” comments. A man can dream

100% agree. I was a redditor for a decade, decided to try lemmy and heard beehaw was a popular one. Tried to sign up, saw they require manual approval with a reason and thought “well fuck” and assumed all servers were the same.

If it weren’t for a reddit post a few days later mentioning that some don’t require the approval, I would never have tried again

This whole defederation situation seems like putting the power in the hands of the wrong people.

Users should choose what they want to see/interact with. Maybe subs/mods. Not entire servers imho.

If certain subs on beehaw want to restrict access, fine because users choose to participate. If users want to restrict themselves or control their own experience, fine because it only impacts them. But when it’s done at a server level you have given too much power to people that aren’t part of your community.

Or maybe I’m wrong… I’m new