YSK: If you're on Lemmy.World or Sh.itjust.works you should not subscribe to any Beehaw communities

SteelBeard@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 787 points –

Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.

Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170

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Do you have any insight why did they do that?

It was due to their (our) open admission policy.

They wanted a more curated experience, and were concerned that our instances would be full of trolls and bots

Honestly that strikes me as perfectly reasonable of Beehaw.

Maybe a little kneejerk to de-federate preemptively, but given their stated moderation goals I totally get it.

Beehaw has sign up requirements to curate the type of community they are. These other instances do not, allowing anybody.

Since any account can be used for in any instance still federated with the instance they made their account on, Beehaw was upset that their curated community was being interrupted by troves of unregulated members of the large, general servers. The tools for moderating Lemmy are also still in their infancy, so the Beehaw moderators were finding it harder to do their jobs.

So they defederated for the time being.

Communities need ways of adding restrictions to posting. Some reddit communities used stuff like Karma counts to prevent bots from joining or even account ages. Eventually bots and spammers found ways around it such karma farming using reposts or using tools like chatGPT to generate post topics that might trick legitimate posters to upvote..

I don’t know of a foolproof way to prevent all spammers, but some kind of tooling is needed to help moderate communities and filter out obvious spammers and trolls