To explore instances (including Beehaw) without restrictions, I created this instance. To be listed on join-lemmy.org, my instance should have at least 5 active users, according here. So would any 4 people consider signing up? The instance host is lemy.lol.
Note that im using lemmony to be in sync with all communities of fediverse.
Update: 5 people signed up except me, my test user account and my community seeder account! Thanks to everyone involved in this!
Generally speaking, it’s fantastic if people branch out like this and the threadiverse is fragmented into many smaller instances.
It relieves bigger instances of (some) content moderation, and as long as the community hosted at the server behaves well it should remain federated with all reasonable instances.
It also prevents one or a few instances from becoming monopolistic, ensuring that the Fediverse will live on in a decentralized and egalitarian way. Theres nothing in the nature of the fediverse indicating that big instances should be preferable over smaller ones - it’s rather the other way around.
There’s also personal reasons of course. If you self host you also get to make all the calls who to federate with - do you want to associate with Threads? Lemmygrad? LemmyNSFW? The “free speech absolutist” crowd? Self hosting gives you control.
Some people also just enjoy having control over the services they use, and some just enjoy tinkering. [email protected] is a nice community if you’re curious. :)
Really interesting answer, ty for sharing your thoughts
I can also see, if it doesn’t exist already, communal ban lists that people can voluntarily apply to their instance. If the ban list gets heavy handed, people won’t use it.
Yes, this is absolutely a thing - there’s a shared list that most of Mastodon has gotten behind. Not without drama of course, but generally it seems to be working well.