Honestly, given the ruckus they've been raising for a while now, my feeling is that Beehaw wants to push themselves away from society as a whole. I don't agree with their perspective, which is part of why I never engage with much of their content or users. All I can say is that I wish them only the best for their echo chamber.
I have been unsubscribing from communities on beehaw and finding their siblings on other instances so that if they decide to leave i have already mostly disconnected from them and my home feed wont become a shell of itself.
It’s less an echo chamber and more simply an attempt at creating an Internet community that doesn’t constantly argue or insult people. Where you treat people like they are smart humans and where others return the same assumption. All different opinions are welcomed. I know I hold a few strong differing opinions than the norm on beehaw and have always been treated with decency. Taking those same opinions in to lemmy general I’ve been called names and attempted to be invalidated instead of people trying to see a different opinion. So if anything it seems like lemmy general is becoming an echo chamber and beehaw is trying to be a respectful discourse community.
The impression I get is that Beehaw is trying to seclude itself not to be an echo chamber, but because an admin saw CP get posted and is traumatized by that, and it’s really highlighting the lack of mod tools. They want to moderate the space to ensure it’s nice (and it’s frankly needed. I made a Beehaw account at one point in time. I reported quite a few not-bigoted-but-still-nasty posts) and right now being federated with everyone makes it way too hard because even if 1% of posts are anywhere from “not nice” to “you literally posted child porn,” 1% of 100 is easy but 1% of 100,000 could be a lot of work.
Ah, yes that too. I was thinking of the defederating with lemmy.world and sh.it.works when I was reading that. But Also, yes, they are likely moving because mod tools on the fediverse are a nightmare. Honestly, I see why the US Congress and major lobbyists want to hold service owners accountable for what their users post. Creating a platform for users to post whatever then not moderating it properly should be and I think is illegal in the USA. The fediverse at heart seems to be designed without any moderation in mind.