It seems unrealistic that a team of 4 people are going to be able to screen the potential flood of new users.

Wait, are both Lemmy world and Beehaw defederating? I thought it was just beehaw. If Lemmy world defederates, wouldn't that mean it will no longer see other federated platforms content. That kind of defeats the purpose of the reddit migration in my opinion.

I can understand the need to be profitable especially as capital has been more and more restricted. I think the decision to price the APIs such that the third party apps have to call it quits is going to end up hurting them though. This reddit migration is a self imposed wound and has driven people to federated alternatives.

At least speaking for myself, I'm going to try to avoid any Reddit clone that doesn't federate with other platforms. The idea of centralizing everything strikes me as defeating the purpose of moving away from reddit.

I still have a rudimentary understanding of some of the Fediverse concepts, but if my understanding is correct, whichever Reddit clone platform I pick, be it Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, as long as they're federated, they can see communities and posts from each other. If this is the case, this does a good bit to assuage my fears of backing the wrong proverbial horse. As long as I can see posts from other communities, then I guess Lemmy are basically clients for browsing the fediverse reddit clones?

As for Lemmy specifically, I started with Kbin, but I like Lemmy's UI better. I couldn't find the option to collapse comment threads in kbin but I found that in Lemmy, as long as I have that and a decent UI I'm good.