Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

BreadDog@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 102 points –
beehaw.org

Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances

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That’s fair, buuuuut why are the admins moderating comments? Why shouldn’t the moderators mod their communities and report problematic users to admins so those users can be blocked.

The admins are probably modding the communities because they probably created them but the proper solution should be to find mods, not just defederate

It’s not a permanent defederation, and it’s only with those two instances. There are still hundreds of other instances that they are still federated with.

Like this one I'm on right now.
(Tbh, I'm surprised how much kbin and lemmy are compatible with one another despite using different codebases)

Honestly the more I see how well such federated sites can connect with each other gives me more hope for the future of federated sites

While true, beehaw hosts some of the largest communities so it's still a loss (temporarily). As long as they find mods within a week things will be fine.

No one on beehaw can create communities except the admins, with the promise that they will personally split the ones they have into more distinct topics as it becomes necessary. As such, that also makes them automatically the mods. It's one of the reasons I decided against it, as well as.... * gestures to headline. *

I was quite curious what removing the downvote button would do to foster actual discussion, since its use is frowned upon in my one remaining reddit kebble sub, and everyone who remains each week is shockingly cordial with one another. Pity to see beehaw crashing and burning so fast like this.

Is it crashing and burning if it aligns with their explicitly stated goals? Seems like they're sticking to their guns and having a well moderated community by doing this. Some people will want that, some won't. But if we want this federation thing to work, we can't start whining about instances making choices about what their users interact with. If anything I'm glad this is happening early so that people can see how the federation stuff will play out and get used to the idea.

Having thought it over, I think the only two ways this can go are that beehaw defederates with almost everyone who isn't a carbon copy of themselves in order to lighten the load, or they put more admins/mods in control (is this possible? I assume it is). Nothing else is going to stem interaction between y'all's instance and every person and post on the fediverse that breaks the rules. What they wanted to do is admirable, but really doesn't scale well with the amount of interaction being seen now.

Temporary measures while they expand their abilities would be the much more expected way for this to go. If instead their solution is to just defederate everything all the time forever because people not signed up for beehaw didn't sign up for beehaw's rules, they might as well have built a wordpress forum for way less money than they're spending. There's going to be too much.

I'm a bit confused by your comment. They say in their post that they will reevaluate when Lemmy's mod tools improve. More granular control over federation could help too. It's a temporary measure.

It's not like they're taking extreme action because they want to cause schisms. "They will defederate with everyone" only seems to apply if every other huge instance also has high numbers of trolls. Maybe not so unlikely, but mod tools on Lemmy will hopefully improve by then. Note: you sign up for beehaw's rules when you choose to interact on beehaw, not when you sign up to beehaw. The issue they are dealing with here is that they have had to disproportionately moderate users interacting on beehaw coming from those instances.

And at the end of the day, if beehaw becomes too isolated, it takes like 5 clicks to open a different instance in my browser and sign up there instead.

For reference, Beehaw blocks almost 400 instances.

I'm assuming most are troublesome communities and it makes sense. But, I do worry they are block happy. I wish they at least had reasons listed or a megathread with reasons for transparency.