Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could've anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don't think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I'm sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn't that many.
Well, look at the bright side: the evolution of descentralized federation now depends on the moderation topic. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes federation to the next level and creates a moderation tool which would work out of the box for the fediverse, at the technology level (e.g. ActivityPub).
If and when this happens, federation has a bigger chance in replacing current centralized social networks.
I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)
In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.
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Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.
This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.
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Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.
Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.
Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.
You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.
I'm just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied...in a straight text based communication medium....?
That's a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn't say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don't know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It's a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The "invasive free-speech" instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you're happy with.
Something I'm looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
liked beehaw but didn't join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.
Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.
It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.
Disappointing but I understand it in the sense that their goal has always been "safe, controlled community" way before they accidentally became one of the largest instances.
I had an account there first, and then made one on kbin since the federation issues with kbin could have potentially lasted awhile, but after this I think it's best to leave beehaw behind if this if going to be any indication of how they're handling their inability to properly moderate at scale. Big red flag IMO.
It‘s the bubble concept I already curated for myself on Reddit by filtering out what feels like half the website. Except now I can sort of choose my pre-made bubble, which is more effort to be certain (have to research the admins of a chosen instance a bit and understand their rules and values), but I don‘t mind that.
Can't bothered beehaw users just simply block the instances they don't like by themselfes? Does this have to be instance-wide?
Do subscribed users from the blocked instances still count against their communities' totals?
I think it's totally fine for instances that want to be small and community-focused to not be federated with the greater pool of the internet. Especially when, as they've said, the moderation manpower and tooling isn't there to handle the extra users.
Personally, I wouldn't want to join a place like that (I've never been a fan of message boards or other niche communities), but it's their place and their rules.
I am out of the loop. Is there a specific reason why? I thought the whole point was that it is a "fediverse"?
Ironically enough I had just added several communities from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to my feed on Beehaw. Luckily I can still see them on my "Subscribed" list - not the content, the community names - so I'm adding them to my kbin subscriptions instead.
I'm glad to see that kbin has gotten stable. I'd been trying to use it for days, but it kept freezing and crashing!
I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It's very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I'll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It's just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.
I was really enjoying some of Beehaw's communities... Can TheDude request a re-federation?
