damn, who could've possibly seen that coming? 🫥

A similar transition took place with mastodon.social and mstdn.social when they both grew prohibitively large; however, in that case, Mastodon now offers much better tooling for moderating and managing federation. Until Lemmy's software similarly matures, this is the best solution that Beehaw can put up.

I don't think you have anything to worry about; Kbin hasn't really been a huge vector (afaik) for spam/harassment. It's just those two instances in particular which were ballooning and creating a moderation challenge but all the admins are in conversation about pressing for better tools and refederating come that day

For Lemmy, right now, this is basically the nuclear option. You will have to create an account on another to interact with content on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Although this could change in the future, what's needed right now is for improvements in the Lemmy codebase to allow for more granular control.

“Unlike President Biden’s student loan schemes, this plan addresses the root causes of the student debt crisis. It puts downward pressure on tuition and empowers students to make the educational decisions that put them on track to academically and financially succeed,” he added.

Lowering people's ability to borrow doesn't really address the other problems which underlie high tuition costs - such as newer facilities costs, more administrative staff (both of which, IMO, heavily relate to the competition between schools to provide the most services to their students and court new student admissions), and decreases in federal and state funding coming from tax revenue which has led to much of the financial burden being passed onto individual students.

Plus, as @misguidedfunk mentioned, we already tell students their upfront cost of attendance - multiple times even before they decide to enroll or start classes - and they have to acknowledge it as part of receiving aid.

The Beehaw admins are currently working on sending out a survey, which will most likely include questions about creating new communities.

Respectfully, I just don't think this is the right post for this kind of humor.

Not currently, but it's been on the radar as a feature request. Not sure if anyone is actively working on it right now though.

You can find that here in a post by Lionir on discuss.online. I'll copy the contents of that post below for anyone who doesn't want to click through.

Here’s a laundry list of sort with tons of tools we’d like to see

• Role for approval of applications (to delegate)
• Site mods (to delegate from admins)
• Auto-report posts with certain keywords or domains (for easier time curating without reports)
• Statistics on growth (user, comments, posts, reports)
  • User total
  • MUA
  • User retention
  • Number of comments
  • Number of posts
  • Number of reports open
  • Number of reports resolved
• Sort reports
  • by resolved/open
  • by local/remote
• Different ways to resolved a report
  • Suspend account for a limited amount of time rather than just banning
  • Send warning
• Account mod info
  • Number of ‘strikes’ (global and local) and reports
  • Moderation notes
  • Change email
  • Change password
  • Change role
• Ability to pin messages in a post
• Admins should be able to purge
• Filter modlog to local
• Better federation tools (applications to communities, limiting)
  • Applications to communities to allow safe spaces to exist (people should not be able to just “walk in” on a safe space - similarly to follow requests in Mastodon in a way)
  • Limiting (Lock our communities down from certain instances but still allow people using our instance to talk to people from those instances)

Obviously considering the moment when this is being made - federation tools are our highest priority.

Respectfully, how on earth did this design get cleared? 😭

While Beehaw generally won't spin up more granular communities without a guarantee that (a) they can be properly moderated and (b) they will have a reasonable large of participants to warrant their existence - in the vein of keeping a more tightly wound, intentionally built community - you may still participate in communities on any of the instances Beehaw still federates with, or join other instances to start such communities there.

While yes, there are a ton of users on those instances, it's more so the fact that we don't have adequate tools for moderating them and maintaining the kind of community Beehaw seeks to provide while remaining federated. It isn't an easy call to make, but Lemmy doesn't offer any kind of middle ground from the sysadmin's perspective.

I have to agree - I was here just on the crest of the first ex-Redditors and it had a really cozy vibe. It's helped a lot by a community and a userbase which is passionate about maintaining a positive culture. I'm glad that you also enjoy it!

Maybe one day we can let those other instances back in on a more limited basis, but it really depends on if/when Lemmy will have better tools for sysadmins.

VS Code, but may switch to VSCodium or Neovim eventually.

There is no should or shouldn't, they've always had and been entitled to that choice. People who develop and host those platforms can make whatever choice they want.

ActivityPub/the Fediverse is only a protocol. If you philosophically disagree with how a platform makes use of that protocol, then you can (theoretically) just use another platform.

It isn't really unnecessary - as mentioned in the post, this is for the very explicit purpose of making Beehaw easier to moderate so that it can stay closer to its intended vision, and these two instances' explosive growth is what made moderating incoming traffic from them so difficult.

In any case, the goal is here is not necessarily continuous growth, to revolutionize social media, or to replace Reddit - it is to build an intentional community which users find nice and inviting to participate in. Besides, there are still other vectors external to Beehaw through which one might interact with this pocket of the Lemmyverse. Like you said, you'll still be able to interact from other places like infosec.pub.

It doesn't feel empty to me, personally (just thought I'd be clear that this is only my opinion) but it is definitely somewhat slower than Reddit or some of the other Lemmy and Kbin instances that are out there. IMO, I think a lot of people coming to Beehaw who're acculturated to Big Social or Big Social-ish experiences are inevitably disappointed with the amount of content because it's not a massive stream of content being funneled into your feed anymore.

But I've been on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) for about four years now and gotten used to the slower flow, that going to Reddit or some other Lemmy instances or Twitter now feels like I'm drowning or being inundated/overwhelmed with content which flows faster than I can give a due-diligence response to. Either I could say nothing, just vote, write a one-off low-effort response, get in a heated debate, or try to take the time to write something more thoughtful (and then by the time I was done with that, the moment would already have past or I'd get some smart-ass reply that would end the engagement for me). Plus there are some concessions involved in getting all that content delivered to you.

Some people like that but it's just not really for me anymore, it doesn't feel healthy. I like being able to slow down and actually talk to people, and I like that I can trust I'll see them again later. I like that I can post something and no matter whether it's popular or not, someone will engage, even if it takes time.

On the other part, I don't really understand how no downvotes is a "weird" decision; it's definitely not uncommon considering some of the subreddits I participated in on Reddit did the same thing. But in any event, Beehaw does have some posts/comments around explaining the reason for certain choices.

If you are commenting in a Beehaw community, yes, you are using Beehaw. Please be nice in our communities -- it's the one rule we have, and by posting/commenting here, you're subject to that rule. If you don't want to do that, you're more than welcome to find other communities and instances to participate on.

Houseless people are suffering through some of the most dire consequences of living in our capitalist hellscape (which is itself built by wealthy people many of whose wealth is ill-gotten through lying, swindling, and other exploitation). They don't have proper shelter, many deal with food insecurity, many are just desperate to have some kind of stable life or just have someone treat them like an equal, like a fellow human.

They shouldn't have to jump through hoops, prove themselves to be the "good" type, perform some kind of perfect victimhood, or pose as saints for us - and, being real, many of us are only one emergency away from also becoming houseless - so that we can pass what fickle judgment we have and decide they're worthy of aid and assistance. We don't really have the capacity to judge them off a small, often one-time interaction, and even if we did, what kind of message is that? "I'll give you five dollars, but only if you do a little song and dance and show me that you applied for a job"?

Frankly, people deserve housing and food, no matter their moral character; houseless people shouldn't have to demonstrate their character to us in order to deserve even a small parcel of what we're fortunate enough to have. It takes some arrogance and lack of compassion on our part to expect that of them, especially when many of us with housing aren't exactly saints either. Given the messaging we get from society, I understand some of the misgivings people might have, but still. Most people in general shouldn't have to do anything special to be worthy of our kindness.

not so hot because things are tense around my house, but i'm moving out towards the end of the week so hopefully it'll be over soon.

Though this community is not extra-dextra-large, there's still a lot of posts and comments about Reddit - so much so that before we started doing the megathreads, it was clogging up the local feed and preventing people from seeing other posts. Even in general, because !technology is such a big community on Beehaw, subscribing to it drowns out a lot of the other content we have.

It may feel anti-fediverse, but this is actually just a fact of federation: sometimes, there are reasons why you might want to cut off even the biggest instances. Of course, that may feel like Beehaw is becoming more siloed, but we still federate with large instances like kbin.social and a bunch of other smaller instances. We can still refederate in the future, but in the mean time, we stuck waiting for Lemmy to improve as a software - definitely going to need as many devs as we can to work on that problem.

The decision is not an easy one - in large part this is due to the massive moderation overhead which federating with those two instances brought and the lack of tools available to address that. It's an extreme maneuver, but it's either that or nothing until Lemmy as a software improves.

I'll leave it to an admin to answer the latter two, but it's nothing wrong necessarily with open registration (that is, letting anyone sign up without an application, for anyone reading this). It's more so just instances getting to a point in size where they boil over, with bad actors starting up accounts on those instances to repeatedly harass/troll/etc. This, at the moment, is very easy to do - especially without email verification (I know that's a soft deterrence, but bear with me) or some other deterring measure.

It's hard for the admins of those instances as well, because there's not as much in the way of seeing outgoing participation from their users either and they can't see their users getting reported or blocked on other instances very easily. At the moment this is just one of two options that exists in Lemmy's software - the other one being doing nothing.

If you're not on those two instances mentioned, you'll still see Beehaw communities and posts and comments from them! :)

People have the choice to filter and handle their own timelines and there’s local timeline already that can preserve the community mission.

This doesn't change the fact that, even if people can do that and we have a local timeline, we'd still have a moderation workload to get through - for the past few days, we were getting slammed on that front, and that is part of why this decision was made. It's not something that was taken lightly or done on a whim.

Splitting the community at this stage seems like a lazy decision - surely there has to be a better way to handle this especially with the amount of support people are throwing at the whole Lemmy thing.

There isn't - the way Lemmy's software is, the admins options are to (A) do nothing, or to (B) defederate. When that is fixed, when Lemmy has better tools for moderating and managing how federation works with Beehaw, that is, ideally we'll have a discussion about refederating then.

I understand being frustrated and disappointed, but as the post says, there is a particular rationale being used to make this decision and it wasn't taken on a whim nor was it the first course of action. The most critical aspect of this decision was quite simply the limitations of Lemmy's admin/mod tools.

If this instance wanted to be closed off and heavily moderated it should have been clear at the start, a lot of people were relying on communities here and suddenly closing them off is going to harm Lemmy as a whole.

Beehaw has very clearly communicated its goals and guiding philosophies in the posts linked in Beehaw's main sidebar, which are just a few of several others. Likewise, its admins have thoroughly explained what motivates their choices with respect to this community, time and time again. It cannot have been more clear that Beehaw wanted to provide stronger moderation than what exists in other spaces in the Lemmyverse currently, although the 'closed off' part is debatable - it's two instances, which have the possibility of refederation in the future with changes to Lemmy's codebase.

Seeing everyone in the comments pointing fingers and calling us toxic evil trolls is also ironically very toxic.

Personally, I haven't seen many such comments at all (& they may have been removed/deleted), aside from some Beehaw users venting about running into some unsavory types from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. That isn't to generalize users from those instances as this can happen when instances grow large and their registration policies are lax (i.e., lacking verification steps/other security measures meant to deter those types). But looking at discussions with the mod team and at feedback from the community, it was clear that a lot of negative traffic was coming to Beehaw from there - in addition to all the positive interactions which came out of those two instances - and it just so happens that their size made it very difficult to moderate all those bad actors.

Most of the content on this instance wasn’t made by beehaw users.

Speaking candidly, we are not striving for sheer quantity of content or for a great mass of interactions here, and what proportion of our content is made by Beehaw users vs. not just isn't really a priority. The main goal of Beehaw is to provide an inviting, tightly bound community for discussion, especially one which is safe for marginalized people and nice people to participate in and where they can have the expectation that the space won't be overrun by jerks, and this decision was made in light of that purpose.

Not yet unfortunately, but I believe there are people working on it - and this may already be a feature Jerboa and Mlem devs are looking at.

While Discourse isn't a bad software, it would be hard to migrate to it at this point & the limitations in the way of that have been discussed before. At this point, we are just counting on Lemmy improving and providing better control.

Yes, it is bidirectional. Lemmy.world users will not see Beehaw.org communities and vice versa.

Unfortunately, there's not a middle ground within the software for us to remain federated on a more limited basis which would make moderating easier but still let users interact between the two, but hopefully with changes to Lemmy in the future, refederation will be possible.

What’re they mad about? 🤔

If you participate in any federated community, you and the content you create will always be subject to whatever form of moderation they have. Even on other instances, admins and mods will still be making calls about who gets to see it based on any particular criteria that is important to them, and on Lemmy, you'll be able to see the impact of their discretion in their instance's /modlog or /instances page. Regardless of that, you have every right to choose any instance which provides the kind of moderation that you want, or to self-host. In any case, I hope you find a community for you as everyone is deserving of.

On our part, Beehaw up til now has been very clear about its moderation policies and its community philosophy (some of which is linked in our sidebar) especially regarding how decisions get made about bans, removals, defederation, etc. and what kind of test things are put to, with a lot of major admin decisions being pinned discussions for everyone to participate in. Everyone is entitled and empowered to do with all this information what they wish.

I agree - my main reason for sharing with this post in particular is because the tie-in it has with Beehaw's recent decision to, at least temporarily, defederate with .world and sh.itjust.works; I just found the framing about decentralization, esp. the fact that the Fediverse is not a monolithic entity mandating a uniformly aligned approach, useful.

On the whole, I do think either ActivityPub's protocol spec would need some kind of privacy revision, seeing as it's already been a Problem where microblogging admins have had to block access by servers dedicated to mirroring Mastodon posts which don't delete their copies after posts are deleted by the user, or the software itself, Lemmy in our case, will have to make adjustments to its implementation of federation like you said. Of course, I'm mostly just conjecturing here and I don't actually know what either of these might look like 😅

The main part of this which I problematize are the people who are sticking their necks out for Meta and suggesting instances shouldn't be quick to defederate because this is, supposedly, a good opportunity to bring federated social media into the mainstream. Yet, in my opinion, they're not making enough of the fact that, even with their open-source contributions, Meta's software manufactures discord and bigotry on a massive scale. Letting them federate with an instance opens floodgates on that and for the stealing and selling of Fediverse participants' data.

IMO it seems pretty clear that mods+admins and the community basically told the person, in no uncertain terms, either to figure out that we don't put up with the "debate-me" nonsense or to fuck off. As a queer POC, I personally find seeing that community push-back vital in gauging whether or not I feel comfortable here.

You did post this on the biggest community on Beehaw after all, haha. It's to be expected that some people will think you're talking about us.

It’s crazy to think that when I joined, Beehaw had <2k users, and now it has about 6 times that. So many server upgrades happened in just one weekend, many new moderators (a dream team, one might say), and many new servers to federate with as well.

Love being part of this ❤️

That's generally the vibe I get, yes. A lot of people seem to think this decision is immutable, but no, as I understand it, we're really just waiting on the Reddit wave to die out and for Lemmy to have better tools.

I think that replacing Reddit as a software and replacing Reddit with a different community/culture are two separate things. People may come to Beehaw seeking to use another link aggregation tool and have another place to build community, but the overall direction of Beehaw is not to provide a 1-to-1 replacement for Reddit's culture and community - though the software is of similar nature, the community doesn't necessarily have to be.

I came to Beehaw from Reddit as well during the most recent wave, and I didn't come here really expecting Beehaw to replace Reddit for anything more than the content format.

You're more than welcome to maintain an account here on Beehaw while having a home on another instance, especially if you still want to interact with content from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. In the future, refederation is still possible, but the main thing we have to wait for is for Lemmy's software to get better.

It's generally because of mods staying on top of it, haha, but from what I've gathered over the past few days from the other mods, doing so has been difficult. I've seen a lot of the content that's been deleted recently for being just downright toxic or spammy and a huge amount of it came from either of the two instances. Which is shitty, because I've also had lots of positive interactions from people from those places and I'm happy for all the cool people I saw who got to interact with Beehaw and experience our community. Hopefully, refederation will be possible in the near future.