Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
Yanno what? Good for them! Not only for swiftly defederating at their discretion (which I support, full stop) but also this open dialogue that is happening.
People forget that defederating can be reversed, but it requires communication and cooperation for that to be an option.
This is a good take. I find it strange that beehaw would be cast as the villains in this situation when an open line of communication exists between the admins with the tentative goal of refederating.
Exactly!!!!!
I would like to thank /u/thedude for having an open dialogue with other instances.
Edit: (how) can I link to a user? @TheDude /u/TheDude
Like an email with @ before
Great to hear that there is a dialog open between the admins. Hopefully it is all sorted swiftly. Federating with all of the large instances is important for the continued growth of the platform.
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/594843
hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.
we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".
that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.
[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
Why did Beehive decide to defederate?
Since lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works didn't have any restrictions on making accounts they were getting a lot of trolls coming from those 2 instances so they defederated from them until the moderation tools become more advanced.
Given that kbin (or at least kbin.social) generally doesn't have restrictions on making accounts either I would assume we're next, eventually.
And if they do, nothing of value is lost.
The community in Beehaw are all cool people, but their weird rules and heavy filtering puts me off.
Beehaw admins give me vibes of a power-hungry reddit mods or overbearing parent who thinks they know better than me.
I'll stick with other instances that allow adults to speak with adult language. I'm sick of the fucking nanny caretaker censoring bullshit that forums tend to eventually become.
I can understand the value of making your community a more tight-knit one with a proactive stance on moderation, that's how Tildes operate and they're doing fine. The thing is I'm not sure I understand why, given this goal, Beehaw is part of the Fediverse in the first place, where there isn't much preventing someone from an outside group coming in. This sounds like a case where a centralized instance makes more sense. Maybe they're trying to see if such a community can exist on the Fediverse, in which case fair enough, but this seems like an uphill road.
The community in Beehaw are all cool people, but their weird rules and heavy filtering puts me off.
Not surprising. From looking around it seem like they want to turn beehaw into a business they can profit off of in the long run.
https://beehaw.org/post/452132
in the very, very long term, we aspire to become a co-op or similar, as a part of fulfilling our ethos.
This is what all us kbinauts were thinking and a few of us asked beehaw and their response was literally "who are you? we don't even think about you" lol. so I think we're probably fine.
I'm sure we'd live somehow
If it comes to that... It is what it is!
I don't need big instances directly piped into my vein to have a good time on the internet.
They only have 4 admins and don't allow users to create communities. It's highly curated, but also can't handle the influx of users from other instances until they have better mod tools, or change their position.
The solution was to ask for more volunteer mods, not the nuclear option.
Its surpassing how much they want to control what other people see.
Sounds like they just need to add a few temp mods.
From my understanding, with the slew of new users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, moderating comments and posts that were against Beehaw community rules (largely because of bigotry and harassment) became more or less impossible. While there has been an overall explosion in new accounts across the fediverse, almost all of their time was moderating users from those two instances. They were not able to find a compromise using the current mod tools, so went with the nuclear option while they figure out new solutions.
I find it a bit ironic how so many people are pointing out how "growing is important to federation" specifically in reference to this... but at the same time, beehaw are one of the few sites that are against growth (as can bee seen by their requiring to get approved in order to join their server... which IMO is no better or worse than tilde's invite requirement)... and, given the timing, it would seem that they are against hosting reddit refugees in particular.
Yes, you can claim it is for keeping beehaw's site stable or curating users or plenty of other more palatable reasons. But at the end of the day, you are still turning users away. I have a lot of respect for kbin not closing its doors to new users, despite the load it is placing on their infrastructure.
Personally, I wouldn't mind one bit if kbin/beehaw were defederated from each other (not advocating for it, just saying I wouldn't care whatsoever if it happened on its own)
You can be for growth and against unchecked growth. The two are not the same.
they're not against growth, it's just not their priority and they don't want to achieve it at any cost.
Which, honestly, I respect. If you know you can't support growth then don't push for it. Huge props to Ernest for dealing appropriately with the growth of kbin.social but I also approve of Beehaw's approach - namely: we aren't ready for that kind of growth right now so we aren't going to let it happen.
I expect something similar will have to be put in place here at kbin as well sooner or later. Eventually we will run up against a limit of what Ernest can do being but a single man with but a single pair of hands.
When I first read about the defederation I had a knee jerk angry response but after thinking about it I really feel like it makes sense for them. They want to have a heavily moderated space and it's hard to do that when you integrate with the other communities. It seems to me they have a level head and are approaching this carefully. I hope that they end out being in the minority but I can understand having a few relatively solitary groups with a focused goal.
Good news. Im on lemmy.world but I'm sure it will work out. As there is no corporation the users and admins can collectively work on share and own the tools for moderations.
Exactly. The improved moderation tools will help everyone and there is no reason to keep it to one instance because of the non-profit nature of the fediverse (so far). Good stuff!
This alyaza character seems like a real gem. I'm imagining all the curious refugees checking the place out for the first time, seeing all of this censorship irony, and promptly going straight back to reddit.
and the paragraphs and paragraphs of intentional lowercase. at least, as an admin, they seem very engaged with the community.
The transparency is refreshing.
I see that in both the original post and now this update that the focus has been on improving tooling for Lemmy specifically. I'm worried that kbin isn't having the same focus on moderation tools. Anyone have some insight into kbin's roadmap?
Kbin is a newer project, the admin needs time to organize it, 2 weeks ago was just a hobby project, now it has +30k users.
I can say he is actively working on making it easier for admins and mods to regulate content.
Well there's this roadmap but it's a month old and things have probably shifted given the past week.
