in summer 2023, when I moved here from reddit, the lemmy instance beehaw.org was extremely divisive. they wanted to create a website according to certain rules rather than a free for all. some people were saying it would be the end of the threadiverse before it even began.
since that time, there have been various other intrinsic and extrinsic threats. I do not see much panicking about beehaw. did the threadiverse survive beehaw? or is this only a shell of what we might have had otherwise?
can someone please explain how one site existing causes other sites to fail? that’s not generally how it works.
The point of the fediverse is the federation. It’s like going to a public meet up, and getting a handful of people to join your private meet up. They used the fediverse to help them grow, and once they were self sufficient they cut the rest of the community off.
Beehaw was here long before the fediverse was popular and long before the reddit disaster that sent people rushing to lemmy. Before reddit happened, they were one of the few active and successful lemmy instances that wasn’t basically just a lone admin hosting a personal instance.
They didn’t “use the fediverse to help them grow”. They helped the fediverse grow when hardly anyone else was around.