Out of the loop

My point is, there wasn't really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.

I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That's the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it'll be confusing for new users though who aren't used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.

The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw's communities who weren't on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they've been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.