I personally find beehaw's moderation weird, I get that you're trying to create a safe and regulated space, but you simple can't do that with 4 mods on the entire instance.
I do think that their decision to jump to defederation is a result of these 4 people being overworked and simply not having the time to rationally evaluate the situation.
if they want to continue like this they'll have to evaluate on whether to appoint proper mods to their communities or just decide to change their stance on "safe" content.
Honestly, I respect their decision but at the same time I wonder why they didn't create a standalone unfederated from the get go.
If you want to keep the community small and tightly nit it's just not compatible with the federation system. Now people got invested in some beehaw communities only to end up disconnected from them.
Still, it's not like there is a guide for this. We are all learning how to make the federation work. I hope we can keep it civil toward instances that choose to defederate.
We are all invested in the same thing:
Making Lemmy successful.
Isn't a lot of Beehaws complaints the lack of moderation on other instances, not specifically their own?
If they're struggling with managing their own content, they certainly shouldn't have to worry about content from other instances. Any instance that hasn't managed to sort out their own moderation should be defederated until they figure it out.
Every individual community inside each instance should have its own set of moderators or it should not exist.
Thank you for pointing this out. Almost all of the complaints I've seen are coming from the instances that were defederated rather than from within the Beehaw community. You can verify this yourself by reading the comments on their discussion threads about the matter. It's almost like the users of Beehaw agree with the decision otherwise they would have left for another instance.
Reddit admins made a unilateral decision a bunch of us didn't like and now we're all here on Lemmy.
Why are people acting like Lemmy instances are any different?
I think that’s the point. They know they can’t manage moderation, don’t yet have a governance structure to support adding a lot of mods, etc.
Defederating as a means of controlling growth while you build the capability to support that growth isn’t awful. As long as people still want to be a part of it once you can get a handle on it.