How are new users meant to know what instances federate with which other instances and which are blocked? E.g. that Beehaw defederated with the Lemmy.world instances?
What (most) users want is to be able to see a sane set of defaults and from there make their own choices about what they do and don’t want to see. But by the time they’ve made an account. Subbed to a few communities etc there is a wall to leaving for another instance if you don’t like the way something is being run given there is no easy way to migrate your profile to another instance that may suit you better.
Now don’t get me wrong, online harassment sucks to put it lightly. Nobody should have to put up with it and it’s entirely (to reuse my previous example) beehaw’s right to block harassment causing instances, but that doesn’t make it any easier for new people trying to get into the lemmy ecosystem.
I don't think it'll really matter in most cases once there's enough people/content. Most people didn't care about forums outside of Reddit's sphere of influence either.
Most people will probably just make a new community on their instance of choice if an instance is blocked and they don't want to make a new account.
I may be wrong but I think I did hear that mastodon has profile transfer, and that is something that other fediverses should be able to do, just there's a lot going on at the moment.
A lot of the people who have been around on Lemmy before the influx are socialists. Some of them are obnoxious, but many Beehaw users went over to that instance rather than confronting viewpoints they disagree with, and also defederating with a good handful of instances (not sure if that was restored).
Some feel that it has given the instance a very "Reddity" sort of tone, but that's true across pretty much all of the instances to varying extents.
When people think of the "devs are 'tankies'" discussion that's been ongoing (who cares about their politics, cause the Reddit admins have far worse politics without catching so much heat?), Beehaw is the first instance that comes to mind, I think.
Meta made a secret meeting with signed NDAs with the admins of multiple Matodon instances in preparation for their upcoming Twitter alternative. This of course wasn't taken lightly by people and has caused divisions. This is what i think the best summary of some of the inter-instance drama that happened, maybe the best summary of events in general ever made on the history of the Fediverse