Hmm.

Consider that Beehaw is more comparable to a major subreddit already. Lets say /r/wsb was having issues with new trolling users and they decide to go private for a week to preserve their culture (and have done in the past before).

Now instead of “just” one subreddit making that decision, the entire alignment of Beehaw (including all their communities) made a decision in one fell swoop.

No matter how you look at it, this is better for the Beehaw community already than what we’ve had in Reddit. And yeah, it sucks for us here in lemmy.world to not talk with Beehaw and for those users to not talk with us for now, but like /r/wsb, there’s no reason why this has to be a permanent defederation. They can refederate after this “Reddit Boom” and when traffic slows down maybe a week or two from now and their moderators/admins can keep up with the new influx of users.

From the perspective of “What Lemmy-software needs to do”, perhaps a “super-moderator”, below Admin but above moderator who has access to user-bans and/or user-vetting is what’s needed for this community. That way, Beehaw and Lemmy.world can re-federate, Beehaw can appoint community leaders who can perform user-vetting (Gmail-like invitations), but Beehaw admins remain the admins. And they get to have tight control over poorly-behaving users from other instances (ie: blocking them out entirely until they’re vetted or invited in).