Why lemmy.world should not defederate from beehaw.org.

FantasticFox@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 147 points –

What defederating would mean:

  • We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.

Pros:

  • There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.

Cons:

  • We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.

Summary

Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').

beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.

What do you think?

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What’s the deal with beehaw? Can anyone Eli5?

They defederated from lemmy.world and another large instance as they said there was an influx of abusive users from these instances and their small, centralised moderation team was unable to manage it.

What kind of abusive users?

Chi1d p0rn posters, among others. According to them, and I have no reason to doubt them.

It's essentially assholes that are taking the quickest route to being toxic. It's not that the instances are inherently toxic, more that they're the easiest way for someone who wants to be toxic.

The main thing is that beehaw has an application process for creating a new account, while most lemmy instances do not. They defederated because they were struggling to keep troublesome people out since banned users could just create a new account on another instance and get back in.

Their moderation/admin policy is very strict, and they only have a few admins to manage it.

Beehaw mods want more curation of users and content on their instance and they think the mod tools available to them are not sufficient to handle users coming from other instances so they decided to defederate a couple of instances, from which, they say, too many trolls are coming due to their open registration policy.