This is where the fediverse is both powerful and a bit of a challenge to moderate. The best way to deal with these things is to be vigilant in sharing information that supports the contrary; since there's no real way to filter out bad information unilaterally (and even if so, I'd find that to be a dangerous precedence as who constitutes "good" and "bad" across the federated instances).

While the post was quite toxic towards the admins, the opinion of the user was done in what I see as exasperation at the situation without necessarily understanding the logic of these choices made for the beehaw instance as a whole; so there's an opportunity to redirect them to a different path or understanding. I'm aware that there are likely several others who share this opinion and may learn from this (just taking a moment to review some of the kbin.socal and lemmy.world threads on this subject shows this as a common concern). Moderation and intervention is more about systemic patterns of an individual's behavior that clashes with a community's ethos. Following the ethos of our admins, we take a measured response based on history and engagement.

As for now, things appear to have resolved through disengagement, so mission accomplished: we got the information out there and addressed their concern (and possibly inform other lurkers and the various instances that federate with us on this point).

1. The account registration process exists to weed out bots. We're not the only ones to implement this kind of sign up. An essay really isn't required, unless you misunderstood the purpose of the sign up. We just tied it to understanding what we consider are our rules for our instance.
2. We haven't left the fediverse, posts and comments to and from beehaw still flow to the vast majority of instances, and we do wish to rejoin these two specific instances at a later date once we have the right processes and tools to work though the problems we encountered.
3. If the admins were cocky or snobby, they would have defederated without any form of announcement or transparency on what was being done and why.

Unfortunately, the inconvenience is something of a catch 22. Do we allow everything through for the sake of convenience? What happens when extreme content that is NSFL gets posted? What happens when illegal content is federated, or hate speech that indicates action will be taken is made? What happens when you observe a pattern of this behavior from a common source? Content must be moderated for things to be "safe" and the rate that unsafe, nonaligned content was coming in wasn't sustainable.

Choosing to defederate wasn't taken lightly and it was done reluctantly. It was discussed for two days after observing systemic effects from those instances and after reaching out to the instance admins for alternatives.

I see you're posting not from a beehaw account, which means you likely haven't seen @Gaywallet@beehaw.org 's post on what it is to be a community and the framework to get there. This posts may help you understand this instances stance on things and what our instances users are hoping for is to build.

All in all, sorry you're not happy, but we're being careful for our community.

If this is true, then it's not good news

• https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144

• https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Heads-up-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and

Some hackernews folk are saying their changes were reversed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354850