To be clear, I'm not talking about SJW, that place should be nuked from orbit.
For the rest of our current federation network, I think we can be a massive positive leftist influence in a way that was never possible on reddit. For the first time ever, a viable social media platform exists that is not for profit. Here we only answer to the Hexbear admins who are our side. We don't have to fight tooth and nail with hostile admins just for the continued existence of our community like we did on the old subreddit. What's more, if I recall correctly, the second biggest generalist instance that we are federated with, lemmy.ml, is administrated by the same people as lemmygrad.
Putting that all together, federation has given us the opportunity to swing these large instances left with our continued presence here. We can bully reactionary users on other instances out of thinking they can say whatever hateful shit they want undisturbed like they could on reddit. We can expose the good faith, non chud users to leftist perspectives they would have never otherwise seen. If all goes well, we have the potential to build a large and united left unity social media platform that won't be suppressed by the need to produce profit.
But if we defederate entirely, we will be leaving Lemmygrad to deal with libs alone. Any Hexbear users who decide to combat liberalism on other instances will be isolated and without the support of their comrades. We'd be the ones getting dog piled and not the reactionaries. Not only that, Hexbear will slowly die off as a result of user attrition without a pipe line pulling in new users. Since federation, we've been seeing our active user count go up consistently for the first time in years.
The chuds on lemmy suck to deal with, but they are incredibly disruptive and loud, obscuring all of our new comrades who silently joined us after federation gave them a chance to see what we're about. Day by day I see less chuds wandering into Hexbear because they can't help but get themselves banned. We'll eventually reach a happy equilibrium when they're all gone, leaving only the good faith libs who are the most receptive to what we do here.
Given all of that and the fact it may soon be possible to defederate from the rest of lemmy on an optional user by user basis, then I don't see any downside in staying federated with the instances we are currently.