Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
So I guess a solution coild be having different switches for getting/sending data to an instance. So in this case beehaw could block receiving updates from sh.itjust.works but not block sending updates to sh.itjust.works. That way we could all still see the content from there while on sh.itjust.works just not interact with it. This could be displayed in the UI by having the comment box and all interaction buttons that would send an update disabled.
There might be an issue on GitHub you could comment on to suggest this. It's the lack of flexibility in the mod tools that are currently available that's leading to this “on / off" style of federation
The moderation tools are pretty rudimentary at the moment. I think the popular Mastodon forks allow for read-only de-federating. Lemmy's software is just not very mature yet.
The moderation tools will come. De-federation is meant to be a nuclear option, with proper moderation tools it would be easy for instances to coordinate moderator actions (like, in this case, banning users from their home instance rather than having moderators run around deleting their posts). The overhead for moderation is too high and the tools are being created on the fly. Part of the excitement of being on the frontier of social networking 😎