this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
452 points (95.9% liked)
Memes
45635 readers
1125 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw's admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That's why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there's definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it's mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I'm new here myself so I'm not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.
We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.
Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.
The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.
I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.
You could say that, they have said more than once that they want their instance to be their safe-space, which is cool and all, if their users are all up on defederating at the fall of a leaf along with the mods that's cool, the "problematic" part are the users that join that instance because it's big but don't expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.
But I've said it more than once, until we get migration tools think of your account as disposable or prepare to keep multiple accounts to juggle servers.
That said, I think they would be happier using a forum-like server instead of the fediverse because they seem like the kind of instance to end up isolating themselves.
Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won't have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.
Hard disagree, I keep seeing the same news/posts inside and outside Beehaw in other instances that have their own community, sometimes they even have the same name.
if you joined lemmy.world for example as a new user, ~~you won't be able to see new comments made by users of beehaw.org. Only those who were made before defederation because they're still part of the copy of your instance.~~
Edit: Had it backwards, you can see their posts, but you're still affected by the defederation because you can't interact with them since they won't see your posts, regardless on which instance you make it.
And if you comment on a community that is actually hosted direclty on beehaw.org, no other user from any other instance will see your posts because beehaw won't publish comments from your instance to the other ones.
The admin of lemm.ee just wrote a long post about the consequences of the latest defederations of instances that are most likely spam bots