The apparently-close connection between the primary lemmy devs and the lemmygrad.rs instance (as well as other potentially problematic behavior/associations) has been a major point of discussion in recent r/rust posts about trying to move the community somewhere off of reddit. One common recommendation in these threads is that the community should adopt/recommend an instance that has defederated from lemmygrad.rs (See for instance here.)

I’ve only just joined (as part of the reddit exodus), so I don’t feel comfortable making this as a recommendation or even a request, but I do want to know: is this something that the current lemmyrs administrators are interested in and/or already planning? Personally, I don’t mind either way (I understand there are pretty good tools available to users to “self-isolate” in this way). I do think, though, that it would be reasonable for special-interest instances like lemmyrs to defederate from all instances that aren’t specifically related to the special interest; i.e. lemmyrs could defederate from every instance that isn’t programming or at least technology related. That said, the obvious reason not to do so is that we’d lose access to programming communities hosted on general-purpose instances.

Again, I don’t have a strong personal stance here, and I realize the answer could change over time, but I think it would be good to have an explicit stance on this given that it has come up several times on reddit already.

P. S. I was surprised not to find an existing thread for this, so please forgive me if there actually is one and I just missed it.