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!
Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.
I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.
Like OP said, the long term goals of both instances are aligned.
Federation and defederation are just part of how the fediverse works. Don't think of the fediverse as a reddit-like network that should always stick together and grow as one userbase. Rather, the focus should be on growing smaller communities that put their interests and users first (just like Beehaw did), while exchanging information with other communities where it benefits them both. If one instance doesn't work for a particular user, they can always leave and join another one. That's the beauty of it.
This. We don't all need to be one big happy family... Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn't mean isolated.
There's a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let's us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for
The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better
I'm all for them running their instance however they want. It's not what I want and that just means I'll be avoiding them.
At the very least there should be a warning that this instance blocks content from other popular instances...