Can someone break down the whole Beehaw controversy?
My understanding was that they blocked 2 specific instances, which people are referring to as “defederating” and “having a closed system,” but my understanding is that all other Lemmy and kbin instances can still interact with Beehaw and vice versa, so isn’t Beehaw technically still federated, they just blocked two instances which is something I would expect federated servers to be allowed to do? And are people boycotting Beehaw? Does that involve not interacting with any beehaw server, or does that mean people are just not having accounts in a Beehaw server?
Edit: and I’m seeing posts now suggesting that kbin is defederating? What’s up with that?
I actually moved from Beehaw to Lemmy.world when that happened, but I have no bad feelings for the Beehaw admins. They’re trying to create a community that is probably a bit more serious and inclusive than most servers do, which obviously is not at all a bad thing by itself.
They noticed an influx of legitimately hateful posts from 2 specific instances, and Lemmy mod tools being young, they didn’t have many other paths forward than defederating the whole instances, even if 99% of the content on those instances were not a problem. Also, they highlighted in their post about it that they’re a tiny team, so they wouldn’t be able to mod finely the massive amount of contents that are coming from all instances if they could anyway; which poses really interesting questions about how Lemmy moderation efforts will be able to scale over time.
But anyway, now Lemmy.world people can’t see recent BeeHaw content, and BeeHaw people can’t see recent Lemmy.world content. BeeHaw is a bit more serious like I was saying, so with a lot of interesting and thought-provoking content coming from Lemmy.world, my feed had gotten somewhat boring… so I switched!
Apparently it wasn't just hateful posts, but a troll attack specifically directed at them, and as you said, they don't have enough mod power to deal with it.
I hope the idiots doing it have been banned but that's not a guarantee someone else won't try again.
With instances as big as ours, a few bad apples can happen unfortunately.
How does this work if they end up choosing to re-federate? I had to create a separate account with the same username on Lemmy.world to use it, would either one from Beehaw or here work?
If they re-federate, both your accounts would work the same, tho beehaw blocks a lot more instances than lemmy.world, so with your lemmy.world account you would (potentially) still see more content than with your beehaw one.
To be very brief:
Beehaw seeks primarily to protect its users and create a space where they aren't going to be attacked for being who they are.
The Beehaw admins noticed they were dealing with a lot of hate from 2 lemmy instances which had open sign ups.
Beehaw defederated from those 2 instances.
There's been some kickback from people who think defederating goes against the core values of Lemmy.
That's all I've got, I'm sure others will be able to add to this