According to https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world
Reached out through Lemmy and Mastodon. No reply from the admin. Last activity from the admin was 2 months ago. Instance is also running an older version of Lemmy.
I assume they are defederating as a precaution, but as the largest instance they have essentially cut us off from a lot of content.
@jonah@lemmy.one are you still around and are you able to reply to them please?
I reckon it’s the lack of an (active) admin. They had issues with spam and worse from other instances, so I assume they just don’t want to connect to any instance which doesn’t have an admin who would be able to immediately stop it. It’s a real shame for smaller instances like us, but it does kind of make sense for them.
But that’s exactly my point. Sign-ups to lemmy.one were always closed so you needed approval from the admin(Jonah) to create an account on the instance. Now since Jonah is not actively involved, nobody can join lemmy.one because he is not approving their accounts anymore. So no new person can join the instance.
As for the users already using a lemmy.one account, they have been using the fediverse peacefully without spamming anybody, even during the past 2 months when jonah was not actively moderating. In fact this seems to be one of the best behaved instances. Now maybe there is a sleeper agent among us lemmy.one users who was waiting for Jonah to become inactive before starting their spamming activities but somehow I seriously doubt that.
Considering the points I laid out above, I feel that the defederation was an unnecessary action taken by the lemmy.world admins. The risk of spam is very miniscule and this small risk does not call for the use a nuclear option like defederation.