in summer 2023, when I moved here from reddit, the lemmy instance beehaw.org was extremely divisive. they wanted to create a website according to certain rules rather than a free for all. some people were saying it would be the end of the threadiverse before it even began.
since that time, there have been various other intrinsic and extrinsic threats. I do not see much panicking about beehaw. did the threadiverse survive beehaw? or is this only a shell of what we might have had otherwise?
I think that the "controversy" died down. Simply because there was no controversy on first place - just a conflict of interests, where you can see both sides being reasonable but ultimately wanting mutually incompatible things.
I think a lot of the "conflict" was based on people expecting the threadiverse to be user owned Reddit, without understanding how the Fediverse operates. As people start understanding the nature of how this place works, one would expect them to also calm down a bit about different communities having different moderation strategies.
Then again, it's the internet. Some people are not exactly keen to understand.
This, too. And additionally, perhaps some entitlement? Like, from my impression a lot of people were expecting Beehaw to conform to what they want (access to the comms and users from there), regardless of that going against Beehaw's goals.
Simply because there was no controversy on first place
To add on:
Most of the discussions I saw were highlighting the differences and discussing what the pros and cons were, so that users could make an informed decision when picking the instance to migrate to.
That's generally a good thing, as long as you don't harass others for what they want. There's a lot of different ways to do the fediverse