I hope that this doesn't lead to fracturing the way it apparently did on Mastodon, where every instance that federated with a set of known-bad instances was itself added to the list of "known-bad" instances that the main instances ought to de-federate from (or maybe it will have to be that way to keep out the trolls); to put it another way, I hope that whichever side ends up being the more useful one in this split (beehaw.org or lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works) is the one that midwest.social gets to keep federating with, if it comes to that, or else I'll need to bother joining beehaw or sh.itjust.works directly.

(I forget whether I had to go through an involved process to register on midwest.social, but I know it's not one of the instances with open registration.)

Oh well, I was subbed into a couple beehaw communities but wasn't really active in them anyways.

Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.

I think the only way around stuff like this is to have some alts hanging around. This account is an alt to the same-name lemmy.ml account, but now only the lemmy.ml account can see beehaw stuff. It's a shame, because beehaw did seem to have something good going with their more curated communities. They could have put out a call for moderators if that's what they need, but instead they decided to close the gates.

I wouldn't be afraid to make a bunch of alts. Simply having an alt account doesn't put strain on the servers. It's the using it that does. Until then, it can lie in wait, inactive, without much impact.