I signed up for Lemmy.World because that was the only one open a few days ago. Does that mean I need to create a separate account on Beehaw to view their stuff now? Why does this stuff have to be so complicated? Is Lemmy actually a viable Reddit alternative or not?
from what I understand.. each instance is like a country and the Beehaw government just banned passports to/from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Citizens can hold dual citizenship but getting beehaw citizenship will have higher requirements. kbin is also open sign-up but not banned because it's users are more chill for some reason.
You know how some subreddits would ban you if you posted in another one? That's basically all this is. We're on lemmy.world which is less guarded, so we're lumped in with troublemakers.
Just like with reddit, the solution is to make a new account without affiliation to the defederated groups. There's a bajillion smaller lemmys out there that will likely never get defederated, and it makes the most sense to have one of those be your home vs the largest instances, now that we can see this kind of problem will occur.
The beehaw admins have stated their hopeful end goal would be a federation whitelist, rather than the current blacklist format. So even if you were to make you own / join a smaller instance it seems like beehaw's entire goal is to be walled off from most instances.
Like I said in another reply though, I just mostly feel bad for the tens of thousands of users who were inadvertently driven there by the site being near / at the top of the list of instances on the lemmy homepage, and now have to figure out if they need to make another account somewhere else.
But in reality it's not like any of the majority of new users could possibly have so much of a "oh no all my posts!" moment if they really felt like they wanted to switch lol.
Not trying to argue with you as you are correct as far as i see it....
Having a whitelist federation List would be worse in my opinion cause it would effectively kill the whole "everyone can start his own small instance". It would be a whole lot of work if every small instance has to get approval from the bigger instances to federate with them. And for the bigger instances to process all applications for federation.
No I completely agree, it's entirely a weird and almost backwards move to be on a federated platform and then seemingly have your goals be at odds with the concept of federation with the majority of the platform.
And while I believe that, as an outside observer, it's also important to realize that from the beehaw admin's perspective they accidentally went from "dozens" to "tens of thousands" of users over the course of a few days.
At the end of the day it's their site and they can do with it as they please, but I feel bad for all the users who were inadvertently guided there by the lemmy homepage listing them at the top, only to be at this weird crossroads now.
That is a very good point. I'm such a situation the only two choices are to make their community your home and okay by their rules (what many of us just left Reddit over) or ignore it and interact with the content and communities you can.
okay by their rules (what many of us just left Reddit over)
People are leaving Reddit over their moderation rules? I thought the CEO did something with the API.
But I mean, yeah, people who have compatible instance rules will federate and the people on those instances will have agreed to those rules. I think you might be overestimating how restrictive typical rules are, unless you think transphobia being called "not okay" is too restrictive.
Does that mean I need to create a separate account on Beehaw to view their stuff now?
If you're subscribed to any communities on @beehaw.org, then yes. After defederation, none of the new content from there will appear on your lemmy.world account and vice versa - people at @beehaw.org won't see your posts on lemmy.world.
Why does this stuff have to be so complicated?
This is how fediverse works. There's no "central place", there's currently 333 Lemmy servers. Each of them is free to take their own decisions regarding moderation and who they want to exchange content with. I know it probably feels complicated compared to centralized approach, but that's the core of these federated services. It's not different from Reddit subs banning users for posting in other subs.
Is Lemmy actually a viable Reddit alternative or not?
I guess time will tell, but if the Twitter meltdown-migration is a reference, then no - majority of people will go back to Reddit after the blackouts are over (I guess today).
This will never be Reddit, and that's good because as you can see Reddit fucks up bad.
I could ask similar questions to reddit admins/ceo.
Why are you killing the app I use to browse reddit?
Why do I have to install a different app that's slower and riddled with ads?
Why are you making this change that I don't like?
Okay this is what I've gathered so far, someone please correct me, Lemmy is one type of instance on the fediverse when they were federated with beehaw they would see beehaw posts and vice versa. This is no longer the case, as far as I understand it you can still go to beehaw and create an account to browse it but you won't have access from your Lemmy account. IMHO this makes sense to me, it's like an entire sub going private.
Beehaw is an instance of Lemmy with a bunch of subs inside it. So it's not like a sub going silent. It's a big chunk of the Lemmy user base and their subs being cut off from a couple other large chunks of the user base and their subs (and vice versa), if I understand correctly.