I may have missed the mark on my point in the main post to be fair; It’s not about fearing defederation from beehaw.org, it’s more about ensuring we don’t get overran by people with ill-intentions before the dust has settled, and whilst the site doesn’t have the manpower in place to keep things like that under control.
Currently there’s nothing stopping someone from the communities beehaw has defederated with from signing up here and going on a fullblown hate campaign because they disagree with the ideals of the beehaw admins. Everywhere they go, those local instances are then looking at “ih8beehaw@kbin.social”, and if nothing is done to prevent that, then it colours the rest of kbin.social users in a bad light. The more bad users you get, the more likely you are to experience widespread defederation, and lose out on a lot of what should make the concept of the fediverse great.
Given the much higher number of Lemmy instances, you may well be 100% correct on that, that is, even trolls may just decide to ‘stick with what they know’ and continue to use a Lemmy based instance.
Also correct, however, I understand that if a post is local to kbin.social, and had comments from lemmy.world users, in addition to kbin.social users, and a beehaw.org use came to the post, they wouldn’t see any of the comments from the defederated users. That is to say, so long as one instance doesn’t federate with another, they will never see posts from that instance, regardless of where they are.
I’m not saying that won’t still prevent people defederating with kbin.social purely because we’re open / federate with another community they specifically defederated from, but there’s less reason to if kbin.social maintains a quality userbase.
Another agreement from me here, however, the point of this post is to start a discussion around whether or not we can prevent being overwhelmed with bad apples too early on in the platforms lifespan (although I appreciate we’ve already addressed this above).
As has been said, at this point, it’s entirely up to @ernest, but I think it’s worth looking at potentially taking a couple more people on to assist with the moderation side of things.