Unsafe isn’t the right way to put it. Lemmy, being so new, has limited admin tools, especially for cross instance interactions. They saw an unusually high number of bad posts from people in the biggest instances, which is frankly expected for being the biggest open instances. Since they didn’t have a better way to deal with people not from their instance, they decided to just defederate from the biggest instances for now.

My understanding is that they don’t like that “solution” and intend to refederate once there’s better admin tools. They want to focus on providing a safe space and the it’s not that the instances they blocked are unsafe, but that the people from those instances make it hard for beehaw to provide their desired safe space for their local instances. They don’t want to change other instances. They just want to make their own communities higher quality.

Personally, I purposefully chose an instance that beehaw hasn’t defederated cause their communities are very good. It’s a shame they aren’t accessible to most of the threadiverse. I personally think their solution was too extreme, but I can empathize with how difficult it must be to moderate massive communities with very limited tooling.