Alt text:
A three panel meme of someone riding a bike.
- First panel: Someone riding on a bike. "Reddit is imploding, quick let's get on Lemmy"
- Second panel: The bike starts to tip over on its own. "Oh shit there's too many of us, we're being defederated?"
- Third panel: They've fallen on the ground by the bike, holding their knee in pain. "Fucking Beehaw"
It's not the responsibility of one instance to get the threadiverse into a "self-sustaining population"
Specially when say community is:
• Comprised mostly of marginalized people.
• not completely open to registration, but requires your solicitation to register to be approved by an admin/mod
• choosing quality over quantity, and has no intention to grow so much or to become a Reddit replacement.
There are more than 300 instances on Lemmy alone (to that you have to add the kbin instances, of which I don't know the number)
The problem here, and what really is stopping any kind of growth, is the lack of distribution. People are going to the same 5 communities and expecting them to be responsible for all the content creation (by hosting communities/magazines), when part of federation is the ability for every instance to have their own community for a topic.
Beehaw has the largest communities in the threadiverse. I think suggesting that it's primarily made up of marginalized people is disingenuous. I absolutely agree with your overall take on the lack of distribution of communities being the problem. Particularly that they are all on beehaw.
I think you're mixing up the people that take part on thread of communities hosted on Beehaw (who belong to hundreds of servers, both in and outside of Lemmy, not only to Beehaw) and the registered members of Beehaw as an instance. I'm talking about users registered at Beehaw.
Beehaw has the largest communities because people aren't creating communities on their instances, instead recurring to Beehaw-based communities. But there's a difference between participating in Beehaw-hosted communities and being part of Beehaw as a instance, a register user of Beehaw. This is not the responsibility of Beehaw, which is closed to new community creation. Federated social media is made by its users and here users have the opportunity, the possibility, and the ability to diversify Lemmy and the bigger fediverse by creating communities in other instances and participating in the communities that already exist in other instances.
Beehaw as a instance aims to be a nice and safe space, and as such attracts marginalised people to register into it. Yes, there are people that are registering in Beehaw without even reading what the instances is about, only because it's a big instances. These are the people that are now "feeling betrayed" or "unable to understand" why Beehaw is defederating from instances that allow trolling. They chose a community that wasn't the best for them, but I don't put them as fault because, just like it happened with the twitter migration, people are being suggested the larger instances and aren't being explained that being on a smaller instance also allows you to federate, sometimes way better than in larger ones that are often blocked/muted/defederated by small(er) instances for simply getting too large.