Except isn't the truth that they experienced harassment from other open-registration instances and in lack of better moderation tools chose to defederate for the time being?
You can find this information for yourself by searching Lemmy. Canβt be arsed with this back and forth when the information is freely available, the mod logs prior to the defederation shows no mass user ban on their instance. Which is what you would expect to see to justify the defederation. They also said they were defederating because of the fact Lemmy.world and sh.itjustworks didnt require email verification on sign up.
My thoughts as well.. I mean, come on, how much harrasement can you get on a platform that has just begun filling with users and barely has 10K users... we'd have to all be in on it, like "hey, everyone, let's fuck with beehaw, he he he π".