It seems that the issue was resolved behind closed doors, so it could have been resolved behind closed doors to begin with, and then if the defederation was to go ahead simply announce the defederation.
Making an announcement "it will be defederated in 48 hours" made for this weird countdown drama thread (we even had programming.dev people show up and be sad about defederation!) that didn't really go anywhere, and then y'all just locked it when we refederated and made it clear that you were never interested in input and you'll be running the instance as you please (which is well within your rights of course). So what was the point of the thread?
I can see how it is nice to have warning if a community you're involved in is going to be defederated, but it also drags drama to our nice little corner of the fediverse, and pins it at the top of our feeds for all to see. In fact it shows up as the top of every feed for me, Local, All, and Subscribed. I can't get away from it.
Every time these threads show up they end up blowing up. Honestly, if you didn't make these threads, I wouldn't care who you defederate. But because the thread exists, I have to come in and I have to have an opinion. That's a personal issue and I recognize that, but I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only one. People who have never interacted with Blahaj nor the instance getting defederated show up in these threads sometimes. These threads invite drama, and for me personally, whenever they come up they make this space feel significantly less safe and make me want to leave Lemmy as a whole because it feels like it's just nonstop defederation drama for days at a time, but it's pinned at the top of my feed.
Maybe these threads actually provide utility, and I should just take these threads as a sign I should take a break from the Internet for a bit. But to me, they just seem like they're all downsides.
I feel like it would still create drama, I mean it's not like the only people opposed to it were users outside here, plus it's not like people couldn't re-post it elsewhere as news since it's all public anyway, regardless of federation.
Defederation is an unpleasant topic and it's bound to cause unpleasantness, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it though, or that we should not give notice or announcements when it happens, it just means that we have to consider and account for the fact that it will come with drama, and to deal with that drama when it arises.
Though I do wish we could make certain posts local-only. I would definitely use that feature when posting, as it's quite useful when you have things you want to share with and get feedback from the instance but not necessarily the whole fediverse.
Defederation always causes drama because Lemmy is biased towards people who value "free" speech over empathy.
The difference it would make though is where the bulk of the discussion on drama occurs. Right now it occurs in our announcement threads that all of our users see. With local only, it would occur in external gossip threads that many of us would never see