Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.

On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.