No I completely agree, it’s entirely a weird and almost backwards move to be on a federated platform and then seemingly have your goals be at odds with the concept of federation with the majority of the platform.

And while I believe that, as an outside observer, it’s also important to realize that from the beehaw admin’s perspective they accidentally went from “dozens” to “tens of thousands” of users over the course of a few days.

At the end of the day it’s their site and they can do with it as they please, but I feel bad for all the users who were inadvertently guided there by the lemmy homepage listing them at the top, only to be at this weird crossroads now.