A few months ago, we posted a discussion thread about lemmit.online, which resulted in the decision to defederate from it:
https://lemmy.ca/post/38374922
The reasons were given as follows:
It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they’re going to feel disengaged.
The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it.
These reasons also apply to lululemmy.com, and so we just defederated from it as well. Same as before, if you were using it and miss it, let us know and we can reconsider.
Yeah, I don’t think a lot of people are going to miss this instance, but it seems fundamentally different from lemmit.online and I don’t think it should be defederated on the same basis. More in the spirit of making sure rules are somewhat universally applied than its practical implications. And who knows, maybe a huge Lululemon fan (?) is going to sign up to Lemmy.ca some day in the future - the fact that it does not have a lot of active users as of today seems as an arbitrary reason for defederation imho. :)
Somewhat off topic, I kinda love that Lululemon is one of the first fandoms to spin up their own instance. I would have expected Star Wars and Nintendo fans to create their own instance before fans of (or the company behind?) some seemingly random clothes company.
That seems reasonable. While I don’t expect those other communities to have much traffic, this achieves the same outcome without a full defederation.
We’ve refederated with them, blocked that community, and updated this post. Thank you for the feedback!