Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities. The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities. There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go “this fediverse thing is just too complicated!” and go to one of the centralized replacements.
“The growth” of the fediverse in general or of any platform in it is not responsibility of one server. The only thing Beehaw admins are responsible for is Beehaw.
If you want Lemmy to grow create your own communities and threads, participate in other people’s communities and posts, etc.
there are more than 1000 Lemmy servers, many of whom are open to community creation (something that Beehaw never has been)
Go create content on Lemmy if you want it to grow.
BTW, “growth” is not necessarily a good thing on the fediverse. Growing too much can be the death of a server.
I don’t mean to the growth of the fediverse is their responsibility, but I feel it is a problem that will affect them along with everyone else. Trolls are an existential threat to a safe space community, but lack of users is too.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation. If you actually read the announcement threads about the de-federation, Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community, so who cares? If you’re that unhappy make your own community (or cry) but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
And to the overall growth concerns, again - who cares? Lemmy doesn’t have to be a 1:1 reddit replacement. I’d say many of us actually consider it’s relatively low user count as a positive.
The pond is very small; prior to last month it was a puddle. That bar isn’t exactly high. Beehaw definitely aren’t seeing the growth that .world is today (there’s been a 40% increase in users here today alone), and I don’t doubt a large portion of that is that fewer people are directing users their way due to the defederation.
I’m not sure we are reading the same Beehaw defederation post. The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts either expressing frustration or saying they will leave for other instances. Judging by the replies they aren’t in the majority, but it is still a large portion of them.EDIT: my understanding of the Lemmy UI was flawed and I was wrong. The above commenter is correct here.
I’m not pretending its their responsibility. Its not. They don’t owe anyone anything. I can still call them out for what I perceive as shooting themselves in the foot. Explain their motivations all you want, I understand what the Beehaw admins are trying to say, but I disagree with them and personally think this will have a longer-term negative effect on their platform than the trolls will.
No they’re not. There is literally only one top level Beehaw comment in that thread and it’s only mildly critical (along the lines of “I understand but this isn’t the community for me”). Every other top level comment is from an external user, particularly the negative ones.
Why are you lying?
I apologize, you are correct; I assumed every account displayed as “[name]@[instance]” if it wasn’t native to that instance, and that every account that was just “[name]” was a native one, but it seems like some (mainly kbin.social?) accounts don’t do that.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw’s issue, I’d be more sympathetic, but it isn’t. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
They have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety over community reach.
That’s the point! That’s the whole point! There are no other tools built yet It IS an incredibly crude moderation tool, because the alternatives are being worked on as we speak