Or in this case, it is an ego driven crybaby fest because someone got jealous other instances got big.

i don't see how this would logically follow—wouldn't our course of action if we wanted this to be something like opening registrations? we very much don't have a shortage of people clamoring to get in here—our backlog is 4,500—and if anything we're worried about too many people, not too few. we simply have no interest in growth at all costs, and we were... honestly pretty fine with being a 700-user instance before the big blowup here. certainly it'd have been less stressful, lol

I can see how it may appear that way, but we are hoping this is just a temporary state until mod and admin tools can catch up to the scale. Open signups and a flood of users in some of the big instances is not necessarily a problem by itself, but the moderation tools Lemmy has today are pretty rudimentary at the moment. This is certainly the case intra-instance, but is exacerbated once cross-instance moderation comes into play, especially when each instance has its own culture, rules, etc.

https://beehaw.org/post/567170?scrollToComments=true

C'mon the thread is pretty clear and detailed as are the admin's responses in the thread explaining what happened, why it happened, why they unplugged, and why they wish they didnt have to.