Aww, that’s a bit sad, but it’s completely understandable and probably the right decision as things stand. :(
Admins, to clarify, which “federation logic/tools” would you need to re-federate with those public/general-purpose instances? Maybe something like:
- Beehaw users may read and write content on restricted instances,
- Users from restricted instances cannot read or write content on Beehaw,
- Unless the user from another instance is manually verified on Beehaw… maybe? But that would be much more complex in terms of development.
Would that be an acceptable solution? If so, I can try to get a look at Lemmy’s code and see if I can implement something like that - although no promises, as I’m currently completely unfamiliar with what lies under the hood of both Lemmy and the Fediverse.
(Not sure who to ping… @alyaza, maybe?)
Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.
The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.
But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.
We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.