Every interaction I've had with Beehaw so far has reminded me of overlord Reddit mods that think they are god.

Isn't this like... the whole point of the Federated Universe? The mods do Beehaw want their server to be a "safe space". They're perfectly within their rights to restrict who can post in their own community. But you, the user, are not in any way beholden to their whims, and can make an account on any other Lemmy instance, or create your own and make it as restricted or unrestricted as you please.

It seems logical to me that the creators of a safe space for marginalized communities would restrict their community from the internet at large because people on the Internet feel emboldened by anonymity to attack others.

I read their post explaining the decision, but it seems like it is at odds with itself. If your goal is to create a safe space, why are you using a federated service? I understand you have the option to defederate, but at that point why didn't you just setup a standalone message board. It just feels that their use case doesn't fit the system.

The community vibe is definitely a huge motivation. They want to be able to control the sort of people on their instance which they can't do if the mass user bases from lemmy.world etc. that are (relatively) neutral have access. It's a shame because they had some good communities established.

According to their suggestions on “improving moderation tooling”, the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances’ users can’t post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work.

So basically they want to have their cake and eat it too. How lovely.

@Andreas @sebovzeoueb They new going into this that they would be federated. They waited to get enough people then do stuff like this. People will leave then as there content will get old fast. They will realize like reddit that people want to be able to search and find new content

Is that right? That seems not in keeping with the spirit of the thing. If they don't want to moderate large communities, how about you don't host large communities at all. Maybe that's what they're after, but they had seeded the space with a lot of logical communities that people were going to click on from the "find federated communities" pages from around the fverse.

Yep, it sounds exactly like a reddit mod power trip

They have 30 something mods, they are 4 admins.
It's not about being selfish, it's about creating a space that they think can be a safe space. That's what's cool about federation, you just use other instances and that's it.

It seems to me that beehaw could already accomplish something along these lines with an "automod" equivalent that just insta-rejects any outsider posts on their hosted communities. So having that built into the protocol as a flag of some sort may actually be a good idea, because then other instances would be able to more easily see that behaviour and choose to not federate with them in return. If I was running a Lemmy or Kbin instance I wouldn't want to bother my users with communities that they could see but not interact with.