I see a bunch of people on Lemmy World that don’t understand how the fediverse works and refuse to run their own instances. Server admins can do what they want with federations, just like all the people here can do what they want when they run their own instances. If you self host you can federate with whoever you want to.
I see a lot of people taking issue with how it was handled. An obvious troll controlling sock puppets apparently spurred this, sure.
But the mods of Lemmy World went on a reddit-like spiteful ban spree, apparently forgetting that we can all see their modlogs or simply not caring about it. People got up in arms over the very childish and assholish behavior of the Lemmy World mods, and folks were eventually unbanned in some cases, but still banned from the main communities as punishment. For example, people saying they would just leave and federate their own instance got banned with mod messages telling them “let us help you with that”.
That’s all well and good in theory, but in practice it isn’t as easy.
Communities here will naturally centralize to the biggest ones. If all of a sudden an admin of the instance that a certain massive community is on goes bananas and starts de-federating from all sorts of instances and makes stupid decisions, just saying “hurr durr just go and make your own instance and community” isn’t helpful because 99% of the people there won’t just pick up and start again on a different instance.
The decentralized nature was supposed to solve the problems with centralization, but really all it does is make the same centralization problems happen more often.
