How I'd describe the situation:
At the highest level there's the Fediverse, which is essentially a recreation of how the internet was before Facebook and Twitter and others came along. It is fundamentally decentralized and so it is much harder for any single corporation to take control of - though these corporations and the feds will probably try and invent new methods to govern as much of it as possible. What that means in practice for us is that Hexbear cannot be banned like the subreddit was, because there's no central authority to do the banning. This goes for every other place too, like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad and so on. There are subsections of the Fediverse which, at least to me, seem to be approximating their non-Fediverse counterparts - so Mastodon is "Twitter in the Fediverse"; the Lemmyverse is "Reddit in the Fediverse", and so on.
So unlike on Reddit, where all the subreddits were forced to interact due to the nature of Reddit being Reddit, on the Lemmyverse we can instead choose whether our "subreddit" (called "instances" now) can be readily accessible from the other "subreddits" (instances). Making another instance accessible is called "federation", and making an instance non-accessible is called "defederation". Your immediate thought will probably be "Wait, but how does each lemmy instance decide this?" And this is the problem that us and other instances are trying to solve to each of our satisfaction. There's the two endpoints on the graph of either a) federate with literally everybody - if they don't want to see our posts or for us to be able to see their posts, then that's their problem and they can defederate from us; or b) federate with literally nobody and become an isolated island that merely benefits from the Lemmyverse devs' work, creating features for every instance.
Most instances will fall somewhere in the middle of those two camps, finding some instances to be in line with their beliefs to a large extent (like Hexbear and Lemmygrad), with others perhaps being less compatible, and so on all the way to actual neo-Nazi instances, which we all agree we shouldn't federate with. All of these discussions we've had about federation and defederation over the last year have basically been us, as a community, trying to answer the question "Where do we draw the line of acceptability?" Naturally, the community here has a wide range of opinions. I would say that there's two major camps on Hexbear:
- We should only federate with instances that share our views to a large extent, are explicitly LGBTQIA+ friendly, and various other requirements depending on the user. This is to ensure safety for marginalized comrades here, which is more important than growth for growth's sake. Marginalized comrades will be attracted here by our views and inclusivity and the safety that we offer.
- We should federate with a broader range of instances that may or may not share our views and may not be LGBTQIA+ friendly. This is for the purpose of spreading propaganda towards their users, and will mean that we can more actively attract comrades by physically showing up in lib spaces that they may spend their time because they simply aren't aware that any leftist spaces for marginalized groups exist. Additionally, by spreading propaganda, we can convert some liberals to our side - the chapotraphouse subreddit was a great example of how this could work, and many of us (including myself) became communists because we were dunked on or were curious about those "insane genocide-denying woke Stalinists" that the libs fearmongered about.
Like many debates, the two sides end up talking past each other a lot rather than addressing each others' points directly. We don't really have data on the demographics of each side so I won't speculate much, but it stands to reason that marginalized people here are more likely to support 1). That being said, there are notable trans users here who are pro-federation, so the debate cannot be boiled down to purely "Marginalized users, who are a minority, want X, while non-marginalized users, who are a majority, want not-X. What do we do?"
In this very thread, you have examples of how people are being affected by this decision. There are some who are saying that if we're just going to increasingly isolate ourselves then there's no point being here if you wanna create more comrades by spreading propaganda, and so plan on leaving or at least spending a lot less time here. There are others who are saying that because there is a significant chunk of the userbase wants to remain federated with liberal instances, this indicates that there is a lack of concern towards the safety of marginalized people here and so plan on leaving or at least spending a lot less time here.
At the end of the day, I have to say that I side with 1) but support the use of local-only communities in the future and greater ability by users to select what they do and do not want to see. I also think that there are many, many more places on the internet to dunk on and spread propaganda to libs than there are places which are truly safe for marginalized comrades. But I do also share the concerns about long-term growth and user retention, and so I hope we can find some way of bringing more people here than is independent of who we're federated with - I know that our trans comrades are trying to bring over trans users on reddit, for example. Growth for growth's sake should not be pursued - if anything, it should be actively fought against - but growth that brings in comrades despite it being slower growth should be encouraged as much as possible. Quality and quantity is largely a false dichotomy imo, but if we have to choose one or the other, we should focus on quality and not quantity.