So, the instance I joined Lemmy on last week largely to participate here defederated from lemmy.world an hour ago. It’s early post-Reddit days, which is the only reason I’m posting a general tech tip in /r/!austin, but it’s a previously impossible inconvenience that isn’t theoretical. Choose wisely or start your collection of alts early!
One read on this may be that lemmy.world may not be the best instance upon which to host !austin (i.e. if, for whatever reason, they’re not able to maintain federation with other instances).
Another thought is if you really want control over your “home” instance’s federation you could host your own instance and call all the shots. I’ve been considering doing this but mostly out of curiosity. Admittedly you would probably want to be fairly technical for this to be a viable solution.
It also looks like the Lemmy devs have been considering the possibility of implementing profile migration between instances, which could be interesting.
All of that said, I’d be curious to know the specific reasoning given by your last instance on why they decided to defederate. I don’t want to sound accusatory or jump to conclusions but this kind of post strikes me as… FUD.
As someone who is going to move a subreddit over to Lemmy, this is a really good idea. I could just host that one on my own, and if I don’t add people to my server, I could make sure that it doesn’t get overloaded. People could connect from other federated servers to view and make posts/comments.
That’s what StarTrek has done. The various StarTrek subs have closed permanently on Reddit and all moved together to their own Lemmy instance, startrek.website.
Profile migrations fix a lot of the problems inherent with choosing an instance to call your home. Having an option to migrate entire communities as well would be super nice, especially in the possible event of an instance shutting down.
Lemmy.ml decided to defederate because they said users would sign up on other sites and then troll the mods. Instead of asking others for help moderating, they decided to not participate in the global fedeverse.
Lemmy.world has lots of users willing to help mod and a server operator that cares. That’s why I will stay here.
Where have .ml said they are defederating?
They are still showing as linked in their instances page
Apologies, I meant beehaw, still getting used to the multiple server concept! lemmy.ml is just overloaded, its Beehaw that was making news today for unfederating.