I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I'm sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can't blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.

Yeah. I'm surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.

I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.

My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.

Yeah I agree. They've been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don't exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it's just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn't replied to their message, but that it's fine if they don't want to talk too.

I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now

I agree with Beehaw's decision, until moderation tools are strong like on Mastodon to quell targeted hate spam and other such 4chan level trash...They have every right to defederate Lemmy and any instance that compromises the wellbeing of their community. I do hope these issues which have caused this situation are resolved overtime. I'd donate to help the effort. Decentralized social media feels like the future of how we interact with others with internet-based communication. It needs support to get off the ground and run faster than sites like Facebook or Twitter.