My first account on the fediverse was on Beehaw and I was happy with it, but defederating from two of the largest instances gave me a reason to find a new instance. Personally I understand and respect the decision -that is the point of the fediverse afterall.
They had a lot of good communities that will not be cut off from the fastest growing instances which will make things tough to rebuild I think.
An idea was brought up that the lemmy software could allow users be make multi-communities (like reddit’s multi-reddits) so that users could group together similar communities from different instances. More specifically I heard of the idea of having an automatic multi-community for every community with the same name across all linked instances.
That sounds like a really helpful idea. Then we wouldn’t have to find each of the communities across all of the instances and each multi-community would necessarily have more users, and therefore more engagement.