Nah. I don’t think it’s an education issue. E.g. I do understand how it works, but see defederation as the nuclear option. As a user in a federated system I don’t care where the communities are hosted that I frequent. As long as it works. That’s the entire point of federation. Otherwise we could just remove federation all together and have everyone create a separate account per instance.
I get where the beehaw admins are coming from and it’s understandable. But it’s not good and chips away at what Lemmy is and could be.
This is one instance now where this happened and I’m not on either of these instances, so I’m unaffected. But if I see more of these defederations (no matter where), the Signal it sends me is that for my needs I likely still have to bet on Reddit and at max this will become an occasional visit.
We are still far away from this point. Just saying. And a normal user can’t be expected to understand it or relate to it. It’s bad UX if they have to. Arguing for them to be educated about it is nice in theory, but misses in reality of how things just are.
This comment captures it in my opinion. I feel like the entire post here is trying to sell something that most folks don’t really care about, failing to see why people are upset about it (rightfully so or not). A lot of theory that fails short in practice.
I understand why the admins did it. It’s relatable. But it should equally easily be understandable why some users don’t like it. “It’s a federation, visit a community with 5 members instead of 20k” isn’t the most helpful advice.