People discredit every type of protest, IRL or not. I think back to every major protest that's happened in response to some major event, and the response every time is "That won't ever work", "You're wasting your time", "Imagine caring about that".
This isn't the death of Reddit, not even close to it. Reddit may even get more popular after this. However, that doesn't mean all of this was pointless.
The Fediverse continues to grow, and that's genuinely a good thing. Every time a platform fucks up, people give X ActivityPub app a new set of eyes and continue to help developers strengthen these platforms and build up the community.
A lot of times the things we want don't happen in 1 big moment, it's a lot of continuous smaller moments that eventually form into something greater.
It's going to take a lot of effort to build out a new platform, especially one built off the concept of decentralization. I think we should continue to build our communities here, and do our best to help this platform thrive.
Firstly, I want to say I appreciate your dedication to creating a well moderated and maintained community.
However, I feel like this is an overall bad decision.
Essentially what I'm thinking is, how is this sustainable?
The amount of control that youre trying to achieve here is going to create an increasingly small and insular community. Also, there is a serious risk of burn out on the moderation end if you're attempting to currate this much, the more this server grows the harder this is going to be to maintain.
With the type of platform that this is, we're going to have a wide variety of people. A lot of them are just going to be bad people. Simply defederating won't fix this, and it will also be a problem here even with manually approved sign ups.
If people want to, they will just lie to get in. Essentially your system right now relies on people not lying to you when they sign up. A targeted harassment campaign could easily overcome that.
What's next? Are we going to deferate kbin.social and mastodon.social? Why don't we just defederate every instance? Even the biggest social media platforms have a seriously hard time moderating content they actually don't want on their platform. You can literally find porn on Youtube.
Tipping your hand on the scales this much is really stressful for a small team, and often doesn't lead to the outcomes that you thought you wanted. I hope in the near future you refederate, but I understand if you don't.