What are your thoughts on Beehaw defederating?
What are your thoughts on Beehaw defederating?
hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post...
My first account on the fediverse was on Beehaw and I was happy with it, but defederating from two of the largest instances gave me a reason to find a new instance. Personally I understand and respect the decision -that is the point of the fediverse afterall.
They had a lot of good communities that will not be cut off from the fastest growing instances which will make things tough to rebuild I think.
i'm new here but i was on reddit for a long time, and was around during the attempted voat migration.
the main obstacle to a new platform succeeding is that you need a critical mass of content. Of all the people who join, only 10% or so will be actively posting, the rest are just here to consume.
beehaw had a lot of activity, and a few of their subs got to what I consider a critical mass for good discussion. and now they've gone rogue.
I understand the mods had a hard time, but... seriously, this is a huge blow to the fediverse. of all the actions anyone could have done, they've done the most damage to the success of the fediverse, right at a time when growth and activity here is crucial.
I can't help but think the mods could have asked for help moderating. it's a sad sad situation.
i'm personally not going to contribute there anymore, because I want the fediverse as a whole to take off.
I really don't get why they didn't bring on more mods from their community. They've been around for more than 6 months. There's no users that have earned the admins' trust in that time?
Moderation is thankless work that comes with heaping helpings of scorn from the community. Even if you're doing it purely because you want to see the community succeed, you will be accused of doing it because you're a petty tyrant who likes to lord it over other people. Plus, of course, moderation itself is work and it's usually not very fun work. I've moderated online discussions before and it really wears you down after a while.
It doesn't surprise me that it's hard to find a lot of trusted users who also want to be moderators.
100%, they are really shooting themselves in the foot by defederating
Hopefully, we can get some better mod tools into Lemmy soon, which will result in even instances like Beehaw not having to worry about federating with big instances.
I think the main current outcome of decision will be that Lemmy users will be hesitant to start any bigger communities on beehaw.org, but this is probably a positive outcome for Beehaw admins in terms of what their goals are.Users can't create communities on Beehaw anyway, so this point is moot.As for what this means for lemm.ee: based on their reasoning in the post, I think it's entirely possible that they will keep defederating instances which grow beyond a certain point, and lemm.ee might reach that size soon as well. So I would recommend keeping this in mind while you plan where to house your communities etc - if you're interested in what Beehaw has to offer, then it might be best to preemptively go directly to them, and conversely, if you're more interested in the wider federated network, then building communities on instances such as lemm.ee would be the safer bet.
Edit: I posted a comment asking if beehaw.org might defederate lemm.ee in the future if we grow more, their response for now was that they doubt it.
That response to your comment is good news. Ultimately, it sounds like Beehaw is open to refederating if they get access to better mod tools and/or those other instances institute similar measures to lemm.ee.
I think it’s entirely possible that they will keep defederating instances which grow beyond a certain point, and lemm.ee might reach that size soon as well.
isn't lemmy.world like... 20x our instance?
Yep, and one scenario is for sure that growth will slow down. But on the other hand, if growth continues at the current place, then in 2-3 months, lemm.ee will be just as big as lemmy.world is today.
And there is also the potential scenario that growth will actually speed up - who knows what will happen when 3rd party Reddit apps start shutting down, for example.
IMO it is a systemic problem of lemmy as a whole. Beehaw is closed registration with human verification only. You apply they verify you will fit with their community by reading what you wrote in your application. Then you either get in or not.
Problem is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are open registration... Just like lemm.ee is. So what happened to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works can and quite possibly WILL happen to lemm.ee as well. It just takes one person using lemm.ee's open registration to make a few troll accounts and post to beehaw and beehaw will defederate with lemm.ee as well.
That normally wouldnt be a big issue but because beehaw is the highest moderated lemmy community it also has the most used communities. For instance their gaming community is the largest gaming community on lemmy by far... like 5 times bigger than the next biggest one. I dont know if that will change now that they are defederating from other servers...
But the point is... it could happen to this one too.
Very frustrating because many of the largest generic groups like news were there.
Yup. News, Politics, Gaming, Technology are just a few I had joined. This feels like a major blow to this whole Fediverse thing if it’s trying to retain momentum from what Reddit is doing, since a lot of the more populous instances just got cut off on the larger instances.
I get where they’re coming from, but like… way to try to sabotage the entire system, I guess.
Just moved here from Beehaw.
I understand what they're trying to do and wish them luck, it's just not my preference to be forcibly isolated like that. The problem is that they're doing this immediately after a sharp uptick in signups, which means a LOT of people just got used to finding their way around Lemmy only for it to be unexpectedly taken away.
My account on lemmy.world is basically unaffected because there's alternatives to all big communities. But my account actually on Beehaw was the one that was punished, which makes me wonder how well they thought it all through.
Oh well onwards and upwards. Hi lemm.ee!
Sad to see, but in the end it will hurt them more than the rest of the fediverse.
things like this, especially right now, are what will limit the appeal of lemmy and the fediverse in general sadly. People no longer have access to communities they like randomly due to the decision of one person at the top... almost like why people were trying to leave reddit in the first place
I created a new account just now on lemmy.world about 10 minutes ago once I saw the announcement. I get what they are trying to do over there but I think defederating is a little much. I am upset about loosing out on some of the communities they have but others will take their places on other instances.
I'm terribly sorry to be a noob about these matters but what is "defederating from another instance" mean? Communities from those instances won't be cached at beehaw?
It means that we cannot see posts and communities from beehaw and vice versa. They basically made themselfs an island. Which is fine, that's the power of Lemmy, we can just move somewhere else if we dont want that. Or join them if you like the small community feeling.
I think it's unfortunate, however I'm damn glad I made my main account here so it doesn't really impact my experience much. Them being able to make this move and community members being able to migrate to other instances if they don't like it are what make this less of a problem than it would be otherwise. Better they show their hand early.
Yeah I just had to manually move all my subscriptions over to here which was definitely not ideal, but at least I don't have years of content to leave behind on my old profile. Bit salty about losing my pre-blackout cake day though haha 😄
It would be great if the management of subscriptions is improved, e.g. import, export, pruning. Right now it is quite tedious to do these manually. Maybe start to write some scripts/tools to alleviate.
I'm wondering if some of the other open registration instances (like lemm.ee which this account is on) will be next. If so I'll have to go through the arduous process of waiting for an application to resolve.
waiting for an application to resolve.
i would not do that, that is like filling an application for abusive relationship. the inability to create your own community was the first red flag that mods of that instance are maybe little too controlling... further rewarding them for that makes no sense. just wait, people with the content will move elsewhere, if they want to die on island, let them.
My guess is Kbin is next. Lemm.ee seems small enough right now that hopefully there's no bad actors. I'm sure a few bad eggs signed up through lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works caused a big enough ruckus to hit the pause button for Beehaw.
I moved from lemmy.world to lemm.ee because of the defederation. Hopefully I don't have to move again. Better moderation tools will help, I guess, particularly the ability to make restricted communities. But people who suddenly have half or more of their content vanish without notice aren't going to be convinced to stay on Lemmy.
If you don't like it, head over to github and provide them with more fine-grained options.
I was really happy with my first account being accepted there, and was starting to build up my subscriptions with content from other instances, happy to see this whole thing working. I also made a kbin account, hoping to see both platforms evolve, and content cross pollinate. Now that beehaw defederated from those instances, suddenly I realized like half the communities I subcribed to were from those, and now I don't want to lose either those posts or the content from beehaw itself.
So, I guess, my new "home" is here, a neutral ground between those instances. Didn't lose much, since the accounts were only two days old, but this is a first showing of how things in the fediverse can go, I guess.
Beehaw has existed for over a year. I'm not sure they'll need to rebuild. This isn't a company that requires constant growth, it's a community. I like the idea of beehaw, and hope that they decide to refederate with the other instances, but I think they'll survive and maybe even thrive without doing so.
That said I'm glad I've got an account that's on none of those three instances
Oh Beehaw absolutely would be fine if the defederation was permanent. By rebuild I was referring to the other instances that use Beehaw as a default for many of their large communities like tech, gaming, news, etc. But from following the situation for a little, Beehaw does not want to make it permanent, as long as the tools become available.