The Beehaw admins decided they would rather rule their smaller, isolated fiefdom with absolute power than allow external users to take part in their communities.

Unfortunately they made this decision, with no forewarning or discussion with their users, after having established some of the larger communities there (Gaming and Technology especially). So now it splits the lemmyverse at a critical moment of growth.

Imagine the average Redditor’s experience now:

• Checks out the Lemmyverse and sees interesting communities on Beehaw - Gaming and Technology
• Tries to register for Beehaw but receives no response from their manually reviewed registration process (with 4-5 admins lol)
• Registers for lemmy.world as it is a large, popular and well-run instance
• Now finds they can’t view or comment on Beehaw content, and is confused over which users can even see their posts and replies
• Goes back to Reddit

Beehaw has acted very irresponsibly over this, it’s practically an act of sabotage - The Federation Betrayed.

I don’t know the why, but the word “defederate” refers to an instance ceasing communication with other instances. That means any posting, commenting, or messaging, no longer works across the connection between that instance and others.

Basically, to everyone on beehaw, the rest of us have gone silent, to us, beehaw has gone silent.