Beehaw is defederated from lemmygrad.ml because it’s an abusive instance full of hateful, vitriolic trolls. lemmygrad.ml resolves to the same IP as lemmy.ml. The creator and head admin of that particular instance is a neofascist who has previously been banned from online communitues, most notably r/socialism on reddit, because he posted Nazi propaganda there. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can actually read him bitching about it to his nazbol pals. Warning: the link is full of disturbing content, including denial of genocide.
I want to be clear that I’m not making anything up about this admin, I’m not saying anynhing that can’t be verified. For example, I’ve heard that he demanded to be unbanned from r/socialism by telling their mod mail that putting Uyghurs in concentration camps doesn’t count as cultural genocide because they’re extremists, but I can’t verify that. I can verify that he tried to back up his argument that There Is No Uyghur Genocide by using articles from globalresearch.ca, a “publication” best known for Holocaust Denial.
I can also verify his vociferous defense of the LaRouche movement and his refusal to repudiate endorsing their rhetoric. For those of you who don’t know what LaRouchists like Dessalines believe in, here’s a sample:
Soros is one of the what in medieval days were called Hoffjuden, the “Court Jews,” who were deployed by the aristocratic families. The most important of such “Jews who are not Jews.” are the Rothchilds, who launched Soros’s career. They are the members of the Club of the Isles and retainers of the British royal family. This has been true since Amschel Rothschild sold the British Hessian troops to fight against George Washington during the American Revolution. Soros is American only in his passport."
tl;dr lemmy.ml is run by a neofascist nazbol who is in bed with anti-semitists and genocide deniers. He uses lemmy.ml as a vector to let lemmgrad.ml gain legitimacy, and he endorses their bigoted views. We need to defederate permanently or our talk about being a safe space for marginalized people is just talk.
we’ve already established we’re aware of the dumb-fuck takes expressed by the Lemmy devs, and we’ve known about them since we got here. we disagree with them. but our concerns when weighing whether to defederate are generally going to be more nuanced than “we disagree with the admins and their dumb-fuck takes”. that is not a particularly serious litmus test, and we’re definitely not going to apply it here. demanding things of us is also not a good way to make them happen–as a rule of thumb: do not do this.
as for practical considerations: we have not had problems with lemmy.ml, we have not had problems with lemmy.ml users making this instance unsafe or hard to moderate, they don’t have open registrations, and they filter the users they take well and in a way we think is actually pretty good. most of your points here are, furthermore, comically hyperbolic–and frankly if you believe them with this degree of absoluteness i’m not sure why you even feel comfortable using Lemmy as a platform.