For just the beehaw communities the posts aren't showing up in my subscribed feed, which is why I asked
ExecutorAxon
It's not the same. The idea is not to defederate, but to STAY federated, while making your instance seem like the best and only option.
To extend your analogy, it would be more like if lemmy.world stayed federated, but switched over to its own forked implementation of lemmy. Slowly introducing cool new features that only exist on their fork to entice users away to their instance. Maybe you see a message like "sign up to lemmy.world to see this" or "your instance is not compatible with this". Now you're forcing other instances to either die or play catch up.
Now obviously the folks at lemmy.world wouldnt do such a thing, because the instance is being run by like minded people who just want to host lemmy. But this is a very real tactic that can be implemented by the likes of google/microsoft/meta.
Now, Lemmy is AGPL licensed which is a nice safety net, but I'm sure a sufficiently motivated company could try to find ways around it.
I'm not sure this is user dependent considering this is on the admin docs page. For users to subscribe to a community on another instance, that instances admin has to allow federation with the other instance.
I just feel like the bare minimum is not strict enough; you could theoretically have an almost fully defederated instance while still having a listing and potentially getting user sign-ups from the lemmy home site.
I could in theory create two such instances, federate only with one popular instance, get both listed, then only federate with each other. Completely diminishes the default experience users will have on signing up to my instances
AFAIK, beehaw does not agree with open registration from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and does not want to take on the added influx of new users interacting with their instance since their registration is closed