Defederation should be a last resort. Beehaw basically defederates with Anyone and seeks to become a private forum. So the comparison isn’t really on par. You are right of course and I agree wholeheartedly that their choice to isolate is their right. Just that I won’t be making an account there, not that I could considering their strict sign up process.

That said, I have other accounts in other instances. I am wary of joining smaller instances as they could disappear any time, and with it ALL your posts.

I do have a vlemmy one but it has become unusable as of late (not sure what happened to the site) and lemmy.ml which remains unused. I have a lot of pending sign ups with other instances as well, non have replied and I’m tired of having to write essays just to join an instance only to be met with silence (which is why I tend to avoid instances without an open sign up these days).

I haven’t come across sdf.org when I was initially looking for lemmy instances. But thanks for pointing that out. If their sign up process isn’t too much trouble then I might give it a try.

I guess that’s the beauty of the fediverse we can support the instances we want and if nothing fits us we can choose to self host (though with a very high barrier for entry).

EDIT: Just checked out lemmy.sdf.org and it requires an essay as well so I probably won’t waste my time with it. Despite the small amount of defederations that lemmy.world has, it still remains to have the best balance between ease of use and censorship (even nsfw content are allowed here as far as I know)

So unless its stance on not defederating with Threads cause a lot of problems, I probably won’t switch anytime soon.