I think associating your basic online identity with your sexual preferences is pretty weird in the first place. Maybe I just don’t get how this is supposed to work. It would be bizarre if my email address or other online identity also directly represented what I prefer in the bedroom.

How do I have an unbiased discussion about gardening or whatever if my address is @gaypower or @whateverhetero

Excellent point. Fidonet, Usenet, IRC, even email lists all solved this problem decades ago. And they mostly worked quite well. The web based generation was a step backwards in many ways.

Meh, beehaw seemed promising until they unilaterally decided to cut off large parts of lemmy. I get why, but I moved to another server because I want to control my own experience

Same. Also all my silly alt accounts. Used power delete to edit them all first so hopefully my footprint is several thousands of “u/spez, you suck” comments. A man can dream

100% agree. I was a redditor for a decade, decided to try lemmy and heard beehaw was a popular one. Tried to sign up, saw they require manual approval with a reason and thought “well fuck” and assumed all servers were the same.

If it weren’t for a reddit post a few days later mentioning that some don’t require the approval, I would never have tried again

This whole defederation situation seems like putting the power in the hands of the wrong people.

Users should choose what they want to see/interact with. Maybe subs/mods. Not entire servers imho.

If certain subs on beehaw want to restrict access, fine because users choose to participate. If users want to restrict themselves or control their own experience, fine because it only impacts them. But when it’s done at a server level you have given too much power to people that aren’t part of your community.

Or maybe I’m wrong… I’m new

for PCs you can just add a hosts file entry, but that’s probably not possible/too much work on phones. split horizon DNS is what you want.