this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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How much effort did you have to put into Reddit to prevent subreddits from disappearing due to going private?
In the Fediverse, there's one more layer of indirection. The instance. For better or worse, Beehaw controls some of the largest groups, whether or not that's due to their moderators or whatever that's on them.
I imagine that we're mostly Reddit refugees right now, this concept of "instance" is alien to all of us. But its really not much different than a "group of subreddits" that somehow got a magic wand and was able to go private together (or share users, etc. etc.).
I remember in Reddit, tons of communities would go private all the time, mostly because they got trolled so hard by other invaders that they had to do so to protect their culture. Whether that's the "trolls fault" or the "community's fault" depends on the instance. But it looks like Lemmy / Fediverse has new tools to deal with this age old issue.
I get that it's very similar to subreddits going private, and that we have no control over that when it happens. I just find it very disruptive to lose 1/3 of my communities all at once due these events.
The draw of the fediverse is all this interconnectedness. But with people being so divisive these days, it just feels like the end will be siloed walled gardens everywhere. If I need a dozen logins to participate in the communities I want, it just defeats the whole purpose, and we might as well go back to old school single-topic forums.
I think that's fair. And I think those communities aren't 100% sure what they signed up for when they planted themselves in Beehaw.org.
Yes and no. We're obviously in the learning stages of the Fediverse (at least, in regards to Reddit-like community building). I don't think its quite time to toss up our hands and give up on it yet.
What does Beehaw teach us? Like, what does it really teach us?
It means that large coalitions of communities are important. That they hold power, that they move as a bloc and that they have influence upon other instances. Is this a bad thing? Will this doom us to single-topic forums?
No. I argue not. What Beehaw wants here is a curated list of users who won't post pornographic memes to their servers. And lemmy.world, being a de-facto Reddit Refugee site, has a lot of users who will post troll-memes explicitly to piss off people like Beehaw.
From Beehaw's perspective, they're trying to experiment with the Fediverse in a way that makes no sense to Reddit users. But... I think I can get behind this. Beehaw wants Fediverse instances to not only be collections of communities, but also of curated, trusted users.
Maybe it works out for them, maybe it doesn't. But everyone is pretty open about this discussion. I'm not entirely sure if Beehaw's perspective is in the wrong, even if I don't plan on joining their server any time soon. I do think it was unfair for the trolls to coordinate a porn-meme-NSFW attack upon them.
But where as in Reddit we would have tossed up our hands and said "Well, the Admins don't care, this is Reddit, can't do anything about it but grow thicker skin"... this is the Fediverse now. New options are available, and it makes sense to experiment with them to see if it works.
What's the ideal future? Well, what if we curated users a bit better? What if user-curation became the norm? Is that too bad to ask for? Why do we have to be stuck in Reddit's troll-friendly ruleset?
There's other solutions. Beehaw is saying that if moderation tools got better, maybe they can open back up and reunite with everyone. I dunno what the Lemmy programmers think of that, but maybe that's solvable on Beehaw's side with their moderators.
Maybe none of this works out and Beehaw is forced into a private instance (or tightly curated list of isolated Lemmy instances). Is that so bad? No. In this case, a hypothetical "ImNotAnAsshole.org" Lemmy instance may open up that can Federate to both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, and one login at "ImNotAnAsshole.org" can serve everybody and keep you united.
Good stuff.
"Why do we have to be stuck in Reddit's troll-friendly ruleset?" Makes me realize that while I don't want to be in an uptight, echo chamber community, neither do I want an environment that's just endless canned snark. I think it's fine if different planets want to do it differently.
Did they really do that? Sounds like harassment to me, can't they be banned?
What's the point of banning someone when creating new accounts is free? They just make a new account and continue the harassment.
As such, Beehaw.org just mass banned everyone from lemmy.world, the source of the attack.
They argue that lemmy.world needs to be better at curating users. Obviously, as a "reddit refugee" site (or kinda-sorta one anyway), that's incompatible with Lemmy.world's idea of running this site. So we're at this standstill, for now.
In any case, these are typical troll tactics. Beehaw was the first to deal with them, and first to click the defederate button.