there is no “sway” when everyone can start their own instance

people use social media to see posts and talk to people. they are gonna go wherever they can see the most posts and talk to the most people. federation is what keeps this gravitational pull from creating a monopoly as everyone flocks to the largest site with the most content.

thankfully beehaw is not the largest site with the most content — lemmy.world is bigger. otherwise, beehaw’s aggressive blocking of other instances might start causing users of those instances to jump ship to beehaw, killing off the competition and making beehaw a monopoly.

Thanks for this write-up. Great link to send people.

it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn’t aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.

it’s anti-competitive, which goes against the “no one group is in charge” spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.

The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.