Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
The fact that users can easily move to another instance will serve as something of a check and balance against this kind of behavior by mods and admins though, wouldn’t it?
Can they though? As far as I can tell there’s no affordance for migrating accounts, so if you want to move instances, you are forced to abandon your account.
Maybe not a huge deal right at this instant, but each day that goes by, users more posts and comments accumulate that makes losing an account suck.
Which means the is (unintended) pressure to stay put baked into the technical design. If letting users move freely between servers is a design goal, there need to be technical affordances for it.