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I think it’s a fair point. They won’t be able to remain federated to many instances if their point of contention is open-enrollment.
I understand needing the Lemmy moderation tools to improve and that it’s temporary, but the damage to their own communities and users may not be temporary.
Their users will turn inward and end up preferring their own communities—which is fine. However it also means that non-beehaw users will shy away from those communities in favour of others, lest their home site get de-federated at some point for the same reasons. These effects combined means slow-to-grow, low-visibility communities in the fediverse, and increases the chance that their communities may dwindle if others of the same subject become pre-eminent outside of Beehaw.
In short, while I understand their reasons, I think that it risks making Beehaw.org permanently insular and ultimately much more similar to a non-fediverse website.
I think their problem is open enrollment in combination with lack of moderation and mod tools to handle that. Defederation is not permanent, as Lemmy implements better mod and admin tools instances which have defederated to mitigate spam or trolls can start opening up more again.
Exactly. The point of the fediverse is the federation. Without that, you have a simple online forum from the 2000s. Congratulations, your time machine worked
I think that is currently already in the process of happening. The reactions to the announcement from Beehaw users can generally be split into
23 categories:-
Support, we should keep our communities insular
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Neutral, I support whatever the admins decide
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Opposition, I'm leaving to an instance that isn't insular
EDIT: Added neutral, because on reflection there were quite a few posts like that
This means they are already self-selecting for insularity, which means the resulting userbase is very likely to want this "temporary" solution to become a permanent one.
This isn't necessarily an issue: if the userbase is happy with their insular nature and are comfortable with it, and it's clearly signposted on the sign-up, then after some network healing where we build communities separate from Beehaw everybody gets what they want
It's also not an either or. You can want to be part of Beehaw to have a close-knit home base while also singing up for other instances to bop around on.
Sup. I'm doing that. It's working pretty well for me. I recommend it to anyone who wants to participate in the communities on beehaw but also wants the very permissive pattern, particularly if you have a favorite community here or on lemmy.world. I see plenty of people who are upset that they really liked a community on beehaw and now because their instance is defederated they can't go there, but consider that that community was the way that it was because of decisions made about moderation
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