This is true but I think we need to remember the internet with less rose colored glasses as well.

There was a lot more decentralization to the older web, but most general discussion still revolved around a handful of big name message boards. Sure you had more smaller forums for specific hobby's like photography or knitting , but there was usually a big photography forum and a big knitting forum and a bunch of mostly dead ones.

Then there are the communities we all fondly remember. Our message board of international internet friends, but slowly but surely those message boards started to just die off as users left and moved on and discussion dried up.

I feel like federation gives us a sort of best of both worlds in theory, though in practice I'm not sure if it will work like that.

Also I feel like regarding beehaw specifically, as it exists this community is broad enough that it benefits from a bigger user base, but understandably its hard to maintain the standard they want. Overall I think the issue for me when it comes to following beehaw where they go is that Im here more for the general stuff and I imagine that the shift will lead to a big reduction in activity in conversation about say technology and news and health and the like. I remember how smaller message boards got on and while beehaw is currently one of the bigger more active lemmy instances I suspect that the majority of users wont follow. Even now most of the content we have sits at less than 10 replies.

I wish everyone luck, and I know the founders were on lemmy long before the reddit bump changed things so they are happy and able to continue on as a smaller more compact entity, but I'm probably not going to move on. That said it's a shame because lemmy discourse and attitude is one of the better parts of lemmy so its very possible that without beehaw I drop lemmy as well(outside I guess mander and @startrek stuff maybe)