I thought the point of paying servers a living wage was to make tipping unnecessary.

No, we are not getting any Beehaw posts from Beehaw, and nobody outside of lemmy.world can see any of the posts in question.

The only time we see any posts that say Beehaw, it’s because someone from lemmy.world is trying to post there. Nobody on Beehaw, and nobody on any other instance can see them.

Go to another instance and check the Beehaw communities. Posts created from lemmy.world aren’t there.

No, check from another Lemmy instance. Those posts aren’t there.

Yeah, but then is Beehaw just going to defederate with every instance that has open registration or limited vetting, past a certain user threshold?

That includes lots of instances. Kbin.social has open registration and is growing, for example.

At that point, is a federated social network really what served their goals?

Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.

It wasn’t a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn’t maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that’s fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they’d like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they’re going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.

Beehaw has good intentions, but I don’t know if those intentions are entirely compatible with the fundamental architecture of Lemmy.

Lemmy’s average user, today, is keenly aware of that. But if Lemmy gets popular, then the average user will be much less aware.

Unless all of the other instances defederate it, people will still see the content in their feeds.