what does it mean that Beehaw "defederated" from lemmy.world?

Dick Justice@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 171 points –

I thought I understood, but I still have Beehaw content in my feed, so I guess I don't understand after all... Can someone dumb it down for me?

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Isn't this like... the whole point of the Federated Universe? The mods do Beehaw want their server to be a "safe space". They're perfectly within their rights to restrict who can post in their own community. But you, the user, are not in any way beholden to their whims, and can make an account on any other Lemmy instance, or create your own and make it as restricted or unrestricted as you please.

It seems logical to me that the creators of a safe space for marginalized communities would restrict their community from the internet at large because people on the Internet feel emboldened by anonymity to attack others.

Yes, the point of the Fediverse is that everyone is free to associate with groups they choose. There is nothing wrong with creating instances that are very isolated. What Beehaw wants with the "improving moderation tooling", however, is a safe space where the network is restricted from them, but they still have full access to the rest of the network. That suggestion is what I was calling selfish, because this way their users would be parasiting off the content and moderation of other instances while giving nothing back.

I still don't see how this is not in line with the ideals and values of the Fediverse. If other instances don't want to take on the extra moderation you are referring to, they can simplify defederate from Beehaw, too.

Every instance can do whatever it wants, and if other instances don't like that then they can both go their own ways.

I don't like the idea of one way defederation, that seems like it would open the door for larger instances to try to shut down smaller ones.

I wouldn't call it selfish. They want tools for more granular control on their instance. That's perfectly fine. If they limit who can post or comment based on the instance they are from. The other instances are perfectly free to limit their users as well in response or for their own arbitrary reasons.

There seems to be a distinct lack of controls across lemmy as a whole. The only option for them is all or nothing at the moment.

I think the big take away is for users to think about what instance they create their accounts and communities on.

Ya I think a big part of the pushback is that I think a lot of people chose their "home" instance based on the guidance provided by the instance admins and then lost access to a lot of the network because of other decisions made by those same admins

Thank you, you put in words my thoughts exactly. Not all communities need to have the same rules as the others, not all need to be as open as others and that is more than fine.
Homogenization of the internet led us to a handful of corporations dominating social media websites and that is awful.

Exactly. Instead of being a reddit user and admins ban a bunch of subs that can no longer be accessed at all, you can still access those instances with another account.

Reddit can in the future ban NSFW content and there is nothing you can do to view those subreddits ever again.

Not the case here.