This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
They’re literally having a circlejerk right now about how they should defed .ml bc they’re convinced it’s a Hexbear-orchestrated honeypot lmfao
My favorate is I think it was them, right after they defedded lemmygrad they premptivly defedded hexbear… when Hexbear never had plans to federate with them
also I need to see this … This will be hillarious, but I mean I would like to see .world try, if any instance could survive on their own it would be them, but I am not sure they can.