ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

Thank you.

I know what it's like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It's nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.

Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There's no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.

Dang this really sucks :/ i understand why it's important from a modding perspective. I guess I'll need to open an account elsewhere and get a client with multi account support

This is going to be a learning process I think for a lot of people. Not just on federation, but on community building as well. You all seem to be trying to build something here, and I am willing to be patient and participate while it grows. If we get down the road and it just isn't working, I have faith that there will be open discussion on how to make this community grow while maintaining its ethos and we'll be here to figure out what is best for each of us individually.

Good on you for taking decisive action at these early stages while we figure out what we want, where we want to go, and how we want to get there on this relatively new platform.

we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space

Fully agreed. I'd personally rather have less overall content, if it means that the sense of community remains strong.

As a minor aside I'm working on another philosophy post about moderating specifically - what I've observed over the years, what I think works well in our vision, what extra work is needed in safe spaces and to prevent evaporative cooling, what I'm almost certain we need to do, and where my blind spots are.

Good on ya. I've already blocked several communities from those instances simply due to the sheer volume of low effort content.

I strongly disagree with this decision -- as lemmy progresses and stabilizes, open registrations will become normal and just blocking open instances will not be a viable solution.

I can't say if this is just a need for better mod tooling or a fundamental problem with federation, but it's certainly concerning.

This is a pivotal moment in the Lemmyverse, and I'm not sure if this will be better overall or not.

It might be a fundamental flaw of federated servers, or just something that should be expected and welcomed.

I guess time will tell.

Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.

The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.

I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.

I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.

So, not to be cold to this decision (because I totally understand that this didn't come lightly and don't want to "well ackshually" the mod team) but given I'm new to the fediverse as a concept, what does this mean for me as an end-user? Can I no longer engage with those communities at all? Or rather, what does defederating mean overall?

This does much more harm than good IMO - splintering the community at such a sensitive time of growth is a bad idea.

Hopefully there'll be the ability to block images in comments and posts, and better tools for blocking / detecting spammers, and cross-instance bans, auto-moderating hyperlinks, etc. soon.

But the demand for unilateral access to other communities' content is disturbing. The Lemmy federation works because of reciprocity.

Definitely won't be recommending beehaw for new users now.

Not a beehaw user directly, but I use many beehaw communities.

I appreciate the forwardness and transparency in this matter. As you've outlined, both in this post and in subsequent comments, this seems to be, rather than a full defederation, a conditional one. I'm totally for that, and I think the ability to do so is one of the key concepts that makes Federation such a useful and powerful tool. Those instances who cannot or do not moderate content that your instance doesn't believe in can simply be removed from the equation.

I hope to see more of this accountability being held between instances in the future. At the end of the day, our communities are fragmented by nature, and there are times we should remove separate communities explicitly. A good example I can think of is on Mastodon all the instances with CSAM or nazis.

The Fediverse gives us a greater ability to fine-tune our communities and curate the experience members thereof get to have, as well as what content they can be exposed to. I'm glad to see people taking strong action in favour of their community, and so long as it comes from this perspective, with genuine communication with the community, everything will work out.

/rant

Thanks team - this is a big decision to make and I'm sure it's a challenging one, but I think it's the right one - both for beehaw and its users and the wider fed/lemmyverse as a whole. I'm really appreciating beehaw's values and how we're sticking to them, here.

Completely agree with this decision, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief; I saw a statistically significant number of lemmy.world users who admitted to being denied from Beehaw because they didn't want to "write an essay" or aggressively disagreed with the disabled downvotes (something that I've grown to appreciate).

I'm expect that the large influx of disruptive users is from the reddit migration, and I'm hopeful that the majority of the users will either adapt to the culture we're trying to build here, or find their own niches in other communities. As you noted in your post, and in my own experience moderating real life groups, allowing a disruptive influence in a safe space can have serious negative effects on group cohesion that can persist for a long time, if it doesn't alter the culture outright.

I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).

Thank you for both your labor, and for caring.

I agree with the general consensus in this thread that, though regrettable, I appreciate what you are trying to do with this. It is fairly straightforward to create an account on another instance to see other content if we want to, and I appreciate Beehaw being its own, special thing.

That's kinda sad, because it reinforces the clutter of decentralisation even more :(

I understand and respect your decision here. Are there any plans to defederate from the porn instances?

I definitely do find this a little disappointing as I think the Lemmy community is too small at the moment to create unnecessary divides and schisms. Success in my mind is predicated on many communities from Reddit coming to servers and forming a common denominator community that achieves critical mass.

It’s clear to me that some of the communities on the 2 you are defederating from you instance have become more popular and are already the defacto “place to be” for certain subreddits.

All that said, I’m happy that my main server (infosec.pub) has not unfederated from those 2 instances so I am able to still participate on those 2 servers AND interact here on my “main” account. This lets me get the best of both worlds. It’s very exciting to see the Lemmy model working in that regard!

If anyone has an issue with defederating to reduce stress (and worse) for our volunteer mods, please watch the Documentary "The Cleaners" (2018) about how moderators in Manila for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter & Co. got PTSD (and worse) from moderating content. Or at least this video about the traumatic life of a Facebook moderator by The Verge.

This is really hard to process.

I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told "you can be open and welcoming as long as you don't dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience". Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.

I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a "one stop shop" for all posts.

As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I'll probably swap to another instance for now.

Firstly, I want to say I appreciate your dedication to creating a well moderated and maintained community.

However, I feel like this is an overall bad decision.

Essentially what I'm thinking is, how is this sustainable?

The amount of control that youre trying to achieve here is going to create an increasingly small and insular community. Also, there is a serious risk of burn out on the moderation end if you're attempting to currate this much, the more this server grows the harder this is going to be to maintain.

With the type of platform that this is, we're going to have a wide variety of people. A lot of them are just going to be bad people. Simply defederating won't fix this, and it will also be a problem here even with manually approved sign ups.

If people want to, they will just lie to get in. Essentially your system right now relies on people not lying to you when they sign up. A targeted harassment campaign could easily overcome that.

What's next? Are we going to deferate kbin.social and mastodon.social? Why don't we just defederate every instance? Even the biggest social media platforms have a seriously hard time moderating content they actually don't want on their platform. You can literally find porn on Youtube.

Tipping your hand on the scales this much is really stressful for a small team, and often doesn't lead to the outcomes that you thought you wanted. I hope in the near future you refederate, but I understand if you don't.

Unsurprisingly this has made some people very ANGY. So much of the anger is coming from the sort of people that it validates to me that I'd rather be a part of a "lib SJW hugbox" run by "dictators" than whatever those people see as their ideal community. Why is it that freedom of speech maximalists are never pleasant people?

Of course it's not an ideal solution, but barring better moderation tools it seems like the least bad solution when considering Beehaw's goals, which don't include 100% unfettered free speech or having to federate with every single other Lemmy instance out there.

Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.

Well I was worried, but I can still access the communities I'm subscribed to from those instances so I can appreciate this more.

My biggest issue with Reddit has been the lack of nuanced discussion. Everything is just black or white. If we can keep that element out of this instance I'll be happy.

I resonate with what @gaywallet said about how we shut ourselves off in environments we can’t trust. I think I forgot how “easy” it can be to engage when you expect others to assume positive intent. I’ve wasted so much time writing and rewriting Reddit comments because I was worried it would be taken the wrong way. And then half the time I’d decide to just scrap it because it wasn’t worth the sweat.

This place has been a breath of fresh air in contrast.

How ironic! I had just subscribed to several communities on those instances this evening. Go figure. I guess I should reproduce my community subscriptions over on kbin. But wait, does this mean I can't even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?

I understand, and appreciate the move.

My very first post on lemmy.world was raided by trolls from an alt-right instance(?). It was not a good experience, and a big reason why I immediately migrated here to beehaw.

That's kind of surprising, especially since there are communities that exist in those instances that do not exist here. I hope that at least, communities can sprout up here (pro wrestling or Green Bay Packers, anyone?)

I'm in support of temporary defederation, if just to hold out until better tools come around to moderate things coming from outside Beehaw.

I've visited Lemmy.world and there are people there mocking other instances for having a tighter registration policy and not having an open registration. They say we are gatekeeping. But even if we try to explain, I think they wouldn't understand what the reasons are.

Frankly, they are chaotic there. I will be eager to watch the developments in the coming weeks.

Well I won't fault you but that seriously hampers my experience using Lemmy so guess I'll go make another account on another instance.

Edit: the more I recreate my account the more annoyed I am by this, you literally have the communities everyone joined and just ripped them away from most of Lemmy's user base. Not cool.

I hope we get the ability to block instances on the user level, too, like we can on Mastodon. I tried looking for a way when sh.itjust.works blew up because I had a feeling it was going to attract a lot of impolite trolls just for the fact that they would have profanity in their domain name. It comes across as a bit antisocial to me.

I'm sure some people picked it because they thought it was silly word play rather than offensive, but it's not like there's an easy way to parse out the easily amused people from the ones who are out to push boundaries.

I support this decision overall. If this space is meant to be a safe and strongly moderated one, it makes a lot of sense. For now I'll be maintaining an alt account on another instance that allows more free for all content and treating this as my safety blanket zone for when it all gets too crazy.

I am a moderator on the lemmy.world sailing community through my Beehaw acct. Will this affect that?

I love Beehaw. It was the first general instance that was suggested all over the place, even the top on join-lemmy.org for a long time. I respect what you're doing, and that's why I joined. I like the local communities and cohesiveness. And I know it's just a few instances right now (pending revisits), but I'm worried that might increase. That, and DotWorld is growing quickly and has a lot of the 1:1 communities popping up to match beloved subreddits.

It hasn't made me rethink being a Beehaw member at all, because I do respect the ethos and understand, but it also means I have to make another account to feel like I can truly interact fully across the Fediverse. But between my Beehaw account, my kbin I've decided to leave within the kbin verse for the moment, making a new one will mean 3 accounts I've got to keep up with (really 4 with the NSFW-only one). It's not difficult to do, especially toggling between them in Jerboa, but it kind of defeats the bigger purpose and unification. Just a ramble to vent. Like I said, I get it. Hope everyone has a good rest of their day.

New users: "I'm tired of Reddit telling me what I can't see! Top-down decision-making is ridiculous! I'm going to check out Lemmy!"

Beehaw: "Hold my beer and watch this."

This makes sense considering the current state of Lemmy's moderation tooling. I briefly ran an instance with open registrations a while back, and quickly got blocked by other instances. The frustrating thing was that there was no place in Lemmy's UI where I had any visibility in what local users on my instance were doing on other instances. No local activity log, notifications of reports or external moderation actions taken against my users like how mastodon forwards reports to the original server, no way to see what potential abuse users who registered on my instance were engaged in unless they engaged in that behavior locally on my instance, which had remained empty. After realizing how bad the tooling was I just shut it down.

Hopefully things improve. I am at least more hopeful here because everything is open source, we can take this feedback to the devs and design moderation and abuse prevention tooling together as a community, collaboratively, and hopefully build better moderation tools than reddit ever had.

I made a comment earlier that I was disappointed by this decision, but after looking through other instances, I have changed my mind and now approve of this move. I'm glad to be here on beehaw where the integrity of the community comes first and is guarded with the best of intentions.

That is completely reasonable and fair enough.

What drew me to Beehaw in the first place is the philosophy of vetted registrations and "be(e) nice" rules. I think so far that's worked excellently so far to grow this platform into a warm community. If we need to deferate to maintain Beehaw's vibe, so be it.

Growth comes with growing pains. Sometimes those growing pains mean making tough decisions. I see this decision as thinking of the long game, and I'm fine with that.

I have a separate account at Lemmy.world, and I can log into that if I want, but honestly, I've been enjoying my time here more. There are still some aspects of federation that I haven't gotten my head around, but I'm trying to learn.

Anyhoo, thanks to our admins/moderators for your transparency. It's very much appreciated.

Support -- "Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves." from Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

I respect your decision, and the transparency behind your thought processes. Beehaw’s stated values, and the culture that you have grown and maintained were what led me to choose it initially. I’ve enjoyed reading and interacting with the people and content here, and the extra thought and effort that goes into typical posts compared to other similar servers.

I hope you’re able to find people you can trust to share the administrative burden, that improved moderation tools are not far off, and that this decision will be earnestly reconsidered in the coming days/weeks as growth from the Reddit Exodus stabilizes.

I believe the Fedverse as a whole will be a poorer place for being defederated from Beehaw.

That said, based on this decision I’ve decided to migrate my primary account to a regional instance. I want to continue to participate in and interact with the Beehaw community, but I’d also like the freedom to explore the wider fediverse and find diverse communities for my niche interests and hobbies. I just hope bad actors from my, and other instances don’t cause further defederation and fragmentation.

I'm one of those new members of this community. I have been welcomed in and am thankful for being given the benefit of the doubt. And I can appreciate how much work it must be to maintain a safe space for everyone.

I stopped using reddit, and uninstalled RIF from my devices this last Sunday, and very quickly realized how much time I was putting into doom scrolling and reading discussions that would end up making my blood boil. Shortly after that, I began to feel a sense of freedom, and I realized how much toxicity was on reddit from a new perspective.

On Tuesday I joined lemmy.world. I was intrigued by the concept of federated software, and was hopeful I could find a community of people there. At first, everything was great (I may have been only noticing the good), and I started to look for specific communities that I might have an active interest in. I also saw a post from beehaw, explaining what they're about. I thought, "That's neat", but I didn't pursue it at the time.

On Wednesday morning, I started to notice some of the things @alaza is referring to, and it was disheartening. I tried to ignore them, but once they were noticed, they couldn't be unnoticed. I asked to join beehaw that same afternoon, and was accepted shortly thereafter. I look forward to growing with this community. And am grateful that one with these goals exist.

I'll bet defederating was a tough decision, and one that wasn't taken lightly. Having moved from one network to the next, only to find the same toxicity I was running away from in such a short time, I am thankful that careful decisions like these were made when necessary to preserve the spirit of acceptance and a safe space for everyone. I hope, as this software matures, that we can begin growing more than sheltering, but I can see how both will be necessary at times for our community itself to grow and thrive.

PS: I'll inevitably use the wrong terms (community, instance, federated...). I've got a sliver of a grasp when to use each one. I'll be cheerfully learning more about it going forward.

This is disappointing considering how popular some of the beehaw communities are (for instance beehaw.org/c/gaming) and now they have been completely ostracized from part of the lemmy community. Or at least the fastest growing part. (mostly because they have open registration). Personally I think this will only hurt the platform as a whole and fragment further, what is by nature, an already fragmented community.

I get why it is being done though. Especially with there being no verification for those servers. They become easy ways to make troll accounts.

Lemmy needs better federated mod tools to say the least (or so it appears to be). There has to be a better way to do this.

I’m glad to see you telling us and coming forward on this, and that these steps are being taken. Lemmy is a small project, so expecting it to have robust mod tools isn’t realistic. Former Redditors here probably know that some subs have closed indefinitely simply because without good third party mod tools they’ll be near impossible to run safely.

Everything does feel quite new and volatile on this side of the Fediverse. The Mastodon instance I use has a very long list of blocked instances, especially since it’s aimed at LGBTQ+ users. There’s some messed up people out there, and I appreciate the action on the part of the admins. Just slapping a “safe space” sticker on something does not automatically make it one, and it makes me feel really good to be on an instance that understands that.

@alyaza I think the "solution" here is worse than the problem.

Well. Guess I'll have to go and spin my own self-hosted version of Kbin just to be able to follow everything, without being at the mercy of third-party admins cutting my subscriptions in a whim. Also, I sure hope that the communities either move into Beehaw or outside of it, fragmentation out of the users' control makes the entire point of federation moot.

Seems a bit much. Get moderators.

Thank you all for what you are doing to build up this nice, safe, open, and fun community space for all of us!

I respect it. I saw someone who said on lemmy.world that Beehaw needing a "Why are you joining?" was requiring an essay. I typed in like 8 words and I got in.

A completely understandable and logical step. It's simpler for a member to log into another instance if they want to keep interacting with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works than to deal with the constant violations. I for one appreciate you guys keeping this a friendly community... sometimes it's nice to take a break from toxic content!

This is a really tough topic and really gets me thinking about this whole system. Until Lemmy moderation tools get better, this is probably for the best. I just don't see a "real" reason to defederate at this point when anyone can make an account from the big list of instances and just sign up with a new account. That's some effort to go through, but I'm sure we all know how dubious and unrelenting trolls can be.

Just earlier today, I saw a post criticizing Beehaw, which lead down a rabbit whole of finding out what some of the more problematic instances are, and the entire premise is just being toxic and name-calling. There's no discussion in there. They just want a forum to type out and spread their hate.

Anyway, it's not definitive so let's just see where it goes from here. If anything, a lemmy.world account + a beehaw account is the best of both worlds.

My ideal wishlist would be to be able to block problematic instances entirely, then a block for specific users of a specific instance that fundamentally makes interaction impossible with Beehaw. Almost like an "okay, @JohnDoe123@123.com has bad activity. @JohnDoe123@123.com can no longer see posts or comments that originate from Beehaw. @JohnDoe123@123.com is automatically added to a global block list for all users @beehaw.org." It would also be nice to have more options like accounts younger than a week old or that don't have a verified email, etc etc can't view or participate in discourse.

Thank you for the explanation. This makes a lot of sense and I think regardless of how people feel about it, it's a great lesson for newbies on how federation works and what makes federated sites so neat. Like...you can come to beehaw and have a fundamentally different experience because of how they've chosen to federate (or defederate) from other portions of the federation. That may or may not be for everyone, and that's okay!

My questions are:
Will you defederate from every instance that has an "open registration policy" if it floods beehaw's feed with shitposts?
What type of trolling are you seeing?
What can you tell to mods of magazines/communities or admins of instances to look out for?

I had missed that, and have been spending the past few days wondering why my feed got so serious (and, well, kinda boring). Beehaw has a lot of solid content to be proud of, but a number of the most interesting and thought-provoking subreddits were re-created on lemmy.world's side. This is your prerogative of course, and I support every decision you take as an admin team, you can only do what you can do; but with this, it seems to me like having an account on Beehaw doesn't seem to have much of a point anymore...

I just created my new account on lemmy.world, and I'll keep this one around just in case the decision gets reverted, but this post also serves as my farewell and good luck to this community. 👋

Started on lemmy.world but came here because of the flood of toxic users over there. Seems like the right call for now.

Just to put an additional perspective on this. Beehaw has been and/or had to defederate instances before to become and stay the safe space everyone here's enjoying. The only major difference here is that this time it hit two major instances and not because of actions or goals of the majority of their population or admins but because the sheer size of the instances made the small percentage of their users, who act in what is considered a bad way, made it to much to handle.

According to this list of Awesome Lemmy Instances, there are 5 instances who's count of blocked instances is way above every other instance (like 5 times more). Beehaw is one of those, in fact Beehaw is on top of that list. While this of course isn't desirable, it made the communities we have here possible in first place and helped shape them into what they're now. Just check the blocked instances list.

I think, just closing the valve on certain pipes is a legitimate course of action in a situation where there is more pressure than the receiver can handle, especially in short term while other measures are put into place (like getting better tools to handle the pressure or expecting the general pressure to go down). If the only two options for this valve are "fully open" and "fully closed" it seems to me like the only course of action to prevent overpressure from flooding the whole place.

As a long-time fediverse user, based on your description of the situation here, it sounds like you made a good decision. If and when they get a hand on their moderation issues you can refedederate. As you say current tools are minimal, and defederation is a very blunt tool, but it’s the only option in a situation like this.

This development reinforces my choice to not sign up @beehaw. The risk of mod over-reach is far more serious than my feelings being hurt because someone wrote a mean spirited comment. So long beehaw mods, I hope your impossible goal to keep the internet free from hatred does not drive you totally insane.

Fuck this. Now is a time for that downvote button.

Thanks for working so hard on this community. I’d like to echo so many here when I say I’d prefer a strong, helpful community vs a large low-effort post community. Do what you have to do to keep this instance healthy. Thanks again.

You are being incredibly selfish and should revert this change immediately

Sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for laying out the admin team's rationale in a calm and collected manner.

Personally at least I had no expectations of your team moderating or otherwise being responsible for the content coming from those instances and thought it was enough to use the new icon set to clearly identify content from Beehaw vs the others.

It's a shame because such a move feels very anti-fediverse to me but I am new to the platform so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

hey thanks for this, its important to keep bigotry out

I see this being a very slippery slope. Part of the nice thing about the fediverse is being able to interact with other communities on other instances. I can easily see Beehaw starting to defederate with more and more instances thereby severely limiting the amount of communities that are accessible. I see the trigger being pulled to defederate from every other instance just to stop any unwanted things from happening.

This has quickly become my favorite instance and this is yet another example of exactly why.

I applaud what you’re doing here, and the community you’re working to build. Thank you!

these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;

I'm on an instance that has open registration and I haven't seen any "trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;"

the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;

Sounds like confirmation bias. Can I see actual statistics?

our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;

"safe space" is ambiguous, what are your requirements for a "safe space"

and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt

Sounds like confirmation bias. Can I see actual statistics?

and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for

Your instance stands for censorship

seems like a good step to take, probably a difficult one for you guys. props to you!

also the incredible transparency is just... breath of fresh air doesn't do it justice

You have every right to do with your community what you want. But I will cancel my monthly donation on opencollectiv and tell newer users to stay away from your instance. This action will do so much damage for the acceptance and adaption of the fediverse.. It's just mind boggling.

Edit: Oh and it will lead more people to Lemmy.ml. Fantastic /s.

Hopefully things change for them so we can refederate, as there will be some small communities I miss on those instances. That saud I think saving the mods, admins and community greatly outweighs the impact to me.

This sucks as I am a member of many Lemmy.world subs

Hmmm; I am new to LemmyNet AND Beehaw.org; but have been falling in love with the platforms. However, I do want to see 'all' of LemmyNet.

What is the lemmyworld 'open registration policy? I ask because all I needed to supply to register HERE is a username/password. ??? Isn't that open registration?

Second, why not allow more moderators - please don't feel like you have to go over old stuff... I'm going to read thru some of Beehaw.org's PAST posts that I'm sure talk about this issue - but it seems like theres a great Beehaw.org community - if yer having issue w/ moderation, hire moderators; I bet the 'cost' is pretty cheap.

Last; what LemmyNet community should one join if they WANT to see the entire LemmyNet? I came aboard Beehaw.org BECAUSE I agreed w/ most of what the site stands for; but since I'm really getting into Lemmy I think I want to be where 'everything' is - good and bad.

Thanks for the explanation - even if confusing for a new user.

I made an account here after reading the mission statement. The very ideals beehaw stands for were the appeal. I support what you are doing, I want this to continue to feel a safe space.

I have no idea whether this is the right decision or the wrong decision, but kudos to you for stepping up and making a decision.

Ok so TLDR for people who don't quite know what this means.

Beehaw are going for a walled garden approach and cutting off our access to content from some of the bigger instances. This is fine, it's their right as instance admins and it creates a safer space for anyone who was only browsing Beehaw local communities anyway. It's best they've done this now before even more people join, but it does suck for those of us who already built a nice feed.

As users we now have a decision to make. If you're an active member of a community on one of these two instances, you'll probably need to migrate your account.

If you're an active member of a community on another instance, bear in mind if that instance grows large you may then be in the same position.

The bad news is there's no easy way to migrate accounts here like there is on Mastodon, and we're going to have to resubscribe to everything all over again from whichever instance we move to. Unless anyone knows any handy tool or anything?

(p.s. It seems like I can still click through to my communities on, say, lemmy.world but presumably they'll no longer update. This is going to really confuse people as there's no visual indicator that the community is blocked from my pov)

I'm the admin over at discuss.online. I'm currently scoping out a plan to build a moderator tool. I'd love to chat to help drive my scope. I'm planning to open-source it. Please, reach out to me if you're open to talking.

I also plan to ping admins of other instances to get input. However, your input seems more immediate as you're dealing with these issues.

What expectations do you have for other big instances in order to not defederate them in the future?

I am asking specifically as admin of lemm.ee. For context, we don't require applications on sign-ups, but we do:

• Have Cloudflare bot protections enabled
• Require verified e-mails
• Require captcha on registration
• Have (and will enforce) rules against abusive language and bigotry

Do you see a likelihood that you will defederate us if we grow bigger?

I want to say thank you, and support the admin team in this decision. I believe this helps keep this community in line with their mantra.

In the spectrum of things, I feel that lemmy.world is closer to the feel of Reddit, not the same, but closer. When I want that, I go there, but I like it here best!

You can see how much crud they filter out for us by going to the communities link at the top of the page, then scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking instances. Direct link to Beehaw instances

Maybe someday I'll decide to run my own server and determine who I federate with. Until then, I appreciate all their work keeping this community aligned with the sidebar!

I am not going to stand for this.

I didn't come here into the fediverse to have instances dictate on their whim that I'll not have access to something.

This goes completely against the idea of having an unified platform. You can of course do whatever you want, but I'll not be part of a closed garden.

While I was subscribers to several .world communities I wholeheartedly agree with this decision. Huge influx of users bringing a lot of reddit meme culture isn't what we need right now.

Do whatever y’all need to do, appreciate the transparency.

I support this, even if I'm not currently part of beehive. I think this is exactly the scenario fediverse is meant for.

I just wonder, if I will still be able to get beehive communities in my feed. What does defederating actually do? Even if I am not able to post and comment in beehive communities, I'd still like to read them.

Hope it'll turn to be right decision.

As many pointed out already feeling severed away from part of the network because of an arbitrary decision of someone else surely is going to impact on the sense of agency of that the end users here might be looking for, especially considering that many are refugees from a network where indeed someone just have took a decision for all of them which they didn't like.
So in this sense I hope the admin are taking this hard decision having well pondered the outcome. Sure it will shield from some users of some other instance, but that is also going to segregate us. And more important where will it stop? What if tomorrow there is another big instance with open registration policy where some users post something toxic here on beehaw, will that whole instance be severed too from us because of few bad apples? And where does it stops?

With this I want to say that I hope that this is a temporary decision, I hope that in the short future there will be a more granular way to ban toxic users, or ban all the users from a specific toxic community for instance, but which is not just banning the entire instance where the account of a bad apple is stored.

I know banning on a per-person basis is probably unmanageable with the current mod force, but I hope that the increasing usage of Lemmy will add features to it and also will make naturally sprout all those user made 3rd party tools which made reddit what is... was until few days ago.

Good luck and good work everyone

Sad to hear, especially at this time of growth. Obviously Beehaw can decide their own path, but for me the values Beehaw stands for have to go hand in hand with federation. Without federation it looses the draw for me. I'll be over on lemmy.world while this sorts itself out.

Hmm

If the issue is mainly moderation tools then here's what I think would be a good way to mitigate bad actors while making the experience seamless for the end user, promotes growth, and doesn't kneecap the fediverse.

1. Make it so that one can block users from one instance from commenting or posting on an instance. (The users on the former should be notified of this). This way the latter instance is safe and curated.

2. Add a way to vet users from other instances so that they can participate in the community without having to make a new account. This way, users of good character on other instances can participate in this one without having to make another account. The vetting process can be manual or automated based on factors like account age, if they have an email, etc.

3. Allow users to block instances entirely. This allows users themselves to have control over what they see.

I don't have much system architect experience but I'll attempt to make a more comprehensive document that takes into account the variety use cases needed in this system after work.

You guys outlined good enough reasons for your decision. I hope this will make things easier to work with.

I personally think this is the wrong descision. The increased users are basically all coming because of the reddit protest and I think most malicious activity will cease when then the influx of reddit refugees dies down. I dont know about sh.itjust.works, but lemmy.world is well moderated, they are just as much struggling with new users as beehaw is, the only difference is that their moderation happens mostly at the community level. There are a lot of good communities on these servers that are worth keeping around. In my opinion we should be a little more patient with them and at least wait a bit until the reddit chaos dies down, because this situation is largely temporary, but our (temporary) defederation will have permanent chilling effects on all of lemmy.

Only read a section of the post but am i getting it correct that you’re basically defederating because of how many users are on the instances?

For now I disagree with this change because of world being the second biggest lemmy instance but I do understand the reasoning. Seeing how you also manage the third biggest instance this is probably gonna change lemmy as well

Apologies, I'm still learning the ins and outs of the fediverse and I have Cognitive Impairment which makes learning harder - is this one or bi-directional? I have a Lemmy.world account as well so does that mean if I'm on lemmy.world, I won't be able to see Beehaw content? Or the other way around where I'm here and I won't be able to see lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works content? Or both?

"we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible" so out of curiosity whats on that list

I'm a new user so I my opinion shouldn't weigh as much as regulars, but here it is anyway.

I support this decision. Some people may jump to it being censorship which just is not the case. They have the freedom to go there if they want to. It's like keeping enablers out of alcoholics anonymous. The AA member can go get booze if they want to. But the enabler shouldn't be allowed inside. If they want in, they need to get in like the other members, not just waltz in through the door while on a kick.

I like this place. I currently feel like it's a great place, and the fact you guys make decisions like this reenforces that.

I really appreciate the commentary and transparency you guys have around your decisions - as someone that does not know nearly as much about federation I appreciate yall giving a framework for me to understand how to approach these topics. Really hope this takes some load off of your guys' backs.

Thank you for the transparency; I fully support this decision.

This was actually my fear when it came to a federated Reddit, I was wondering what was stopping admins from defederating with any instance for any reason, and what would happen when they did. It seemed like communities would become centralised on a few instances, which seemed against the point of a federated internet.

I've since started thinking of this site more as a forum, where you can also access other forums from. And suddenly it clicked as to why I would use this site. And I think Lemmy being hailed as a Reddit replacement has actually done a disservice to its potential.

I do think, however, that there needs to be discussions as a community about what we do and don't want here, and I think the most important one is about what communities we want and how we want to handle them. I don't believe that I was subscribed to any communities on these instances, but I'm sure that there probably would have been some that I would have enjoyed.

I have to say that this decision is disappointing. I fully understand the reasons behind it, but part of my signing up with this instance was for access to Lemmy.world.

Oh wow, totally get it though yeah it kinda sucks because there's some great communities there already. But, hopefully we can refederate in the future when the dust clears. REALLY glad I was able to get my Beehaw account set up just earlier today though lol

Thank you. I really appreciate what you're trying to build and the work you do. I'm impressed

Given the stated goals for this community and the tools that are currently available, this seems a reasonable approach. I do hope the need ends up being only temporary, but I think it is more important to preserve the core essence of what you are trying to build than allow it to fail due to outside problems.

@alyaza Been a hot minute since I logged into beehaw but I love the team's decisiveness on this. I'm surprised more instances didn't take this route when dealing with mastodon.social

It's important to start well. We're building a foundation for the future here. Positive convo's and meaningful moderation go hand in hand. I appreciate it.

Unfortunate, but I understand. I hope the moderation tools improve enough to refederate down the road.

Personally, I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this, so it troubles me.

On the one hand, I understand the admins' need to bring trolling and bad faith content under control, and ultimately this instance is theirs to do with as they feel necessary. I'm a mod in a couple of the communities and have yet to see anything troubling, but that's not to say that we won't get inundated with fuckery from people who don't know how to behave.

However, this makes it very difficult to see Lemmy as a useful alternative to Reddit.

I'm subscribed to a number of communities from a range of instances, some of which have just been excised completely from my feed. As I understand it, over on Mastodon, if the admin of the instance I use chose to defederate from a server where some of my follows are, I'll still see those follows, but general content from the instance won't make it through the net. And that's ok.

Yeah, I'm wrong on that. I confused instance limitation with defederation.

There doesn't appear to be such nuance here on Lemmy; it's all or nothing. And this could lead to Beehaw becoming a limited, silo'd forum.

But ultimately, this feels mostly like it's a problem for the admins of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to address in being more responsible instance runners, and Beehaw is the server that put up with their shit less than the others.

So when all's said and done, I support the admins' decision, but it's not without hesitation.

I think the ideal way to interface with open registration communities would be to have a registration process where they can access beehaw from that server after they've filled out an application just as we did to be able to join here. I'm not a coder, but I think that wouldn't be too challenging a feature.

I'm not excited about losing access to a bunch of communities on the fediverse. I'm not excited about needing a 2nd account if I want to avoid this. I hope a resolution can be found to roll this back without causing the admins too much pain.

This kind of sucks. But until we get something equivalent to Mastodon's limited and better moderation tools, this'll have to do. I don't envy the mods workload.

Hopefully in the future we'll be able to "re-federate".

I can totally respect that this was a lovely, safe and small community before the reddit influx, and you want to keep it that way. I'm a new reddit refugee and I signed up here because i love the ethos, but ultimately I've made an alt over at lemmy.world so i can view all the content they produce on my main feed.

Not sure where my home will be, or what i'm looking to get out of lemmy, but weather I end up back here or not, I appreciate all beehaw has done to introduce me to lemmy and the lovely interactions i've had here already

I completely understand and support the decision to cut the ties, even if it is unfortunate that it should be necessary. This is a nice instance and I hope it can stay that way, even for the mods. I have no idea how much work and perseverance it takes to run something like this but I know I couldn't do it. If the people running Beehaw say that it is too much to handle, then we should believe them. Without them, this would not be the nice place it is. I'm on Sopuli myself, but I like the vibe here and would hate to see it destroyed by trolls. Just my two cents. Cheers.

Love that this instance has decided to stick to its guns and take actions that support the mission as a first priority. The nature of the fediverse is such that anyone who wants the content can still go get it, it's as simple as another bookmark in your browser, and this space can remain bully-free. 100% support this decision, well done.

I foresee a problem one day in the near future where users from certain instances get referred to links to content that they can't interact with, which... may ruffle a feather or two.

I'm surprised that lemmy.ml and kbin.social don't create a lot of moderation activity.

I have nothing intelligent to add (except signaling my support) and to remark that defederation and defenestration are incredibly close words.

i think you take a wrong decision : i appreciate beehaw, but whatever you will do, you can't control everything let people use 'block user' feature, that's the purpose of this feature, and focus only on what people report as 'bad user'. Defederate for a toxic instance as 'lemmygrad' is good, but defederate from lemmy.world makes no sense for me. i hope it's just a temporary decision

You are free to do whatever you would like with your server, but I won't pretend this is isn't pretty disappointing.

I've enjoyed this community a lot from what I've seen so far, and was very happy to have my main account live here.

However, while I appreciate a place that is focused on being nice, and freely hostile to the hostile, I'm not interested in an experience so sheltered that it feels hidden from the world at large. In regards to your statements that you wanted to avoid an echo chamber, this action seems very contradictory.

To be clear I don't think your issues were small. Trolls flooding your instance from larger instances is terrible and must be overwhelming and unsolvable for your small mod team. However, I see this as growing pains for a platform like this. I expected a response like petitioning your recently grown community for additional moderators. I didn't expect a rejection of the larger lemmy community and the growth it has been experiencing.

I'm not exactly certain how all parts of federation work yet, but I hope I'll be able to find a server that is a 3rd party, and federated with major instances as well as beehaw, where I can make my new account, and see the greater breadth of content I desire, without being cut off from beehaw. If anyone could recommend a server, that would be greatly appreciated. If that isn't how it works and isn't possible, then at least, thank you beehaw for introducing me to the fediverse.

I think we need to emphasize the temporary nature of this decision. Maybe put out something like a small bounty for better mod tools on the lemmy side? Maybe I'm just being crazy but I fear for the potential schism of the entire fediverse.

Aww, that’s a bit sad, but it’s completely understandable and probably the right decision as things stand. :(

Admins, to clarify, which “federation logic/tools” would you need to re-federate with those public/general-purpose instances? Maybe something like:

• Beehaw users may read and write content on restricted instances,
• Users from restricted instances cannot read or write content on Beehaw,
• Unless the user from another instance is manually verified on Beehaw… maybe? But that would be much more complex in terms of development.

Would that be an acceptable solution? If so, I can try to get a look at Lemmy’s code and see if I can implement something like that - although no promises, as I’m currently completely unfamiliar with what lies under the hood of both Lemmy and the Fediverse.

(Not sure who to ping… @alyaza, maybe?)

Not a fan of this decision and will probably be parting ways with Beehaw tbh.

People have the choice to filter and handle their own timelines and there's local timeline already that can preserve the community mission. Splitting the community at this stage seems like a lazy decision - surely there has to be a better way to handle this especially with the amount of support people are throwing at the whole Lemmy thing.

I completely understand this decision, though I personally enjoy the freedom of being able to go to multiple instances. Hopefully, as the mod tools develop further and more limited forms of defederation are created, lemmy.world and beehaw.org may be able to come together again, at least slightly. For now though, I understand isolating your community to preserve its culture and community.

Just chiming in to say that while I can understand some people's frustration, I support this.

The community here is great and I'd like it to stay that way.

In real life, I choose to associate with good people and avoid areas where the quality of people who can show is completely unpredictable or not my taste.

i prefer a chill bar with quiet outside seating and no live music. I go there specifically because I'm not looking for a biker bar experience.

I see it as a strength to the fediverse. It's no different than different forums back in the day. I do understand that my above statement would be akin to different communities, but I agree that even if someone's behavior is only "bad" in a community where that was acceptable, it does affect the community as a whole, knowing that they're lurking (in terms of feeling like this is a safe space).

Keep up the good work, and thank you for having to make these difficult decisions; I know it's not easy.

Disappointing, but understandable given the tools (or lack thereof) available for moderation at the minute. I’d like to see something like the Message Rewrite Facility system that Akkoma has, that gives you a lot more fine-grained control over what happens to incoming messages from other instances, although I’m not sure how some of that would work in this format. I’m sure something will come further down the line.

Personally I’m not bothered, I’m setting up my own single-user instance (to go with my current Akkoma one) so I can subscribe to whatever from anywhere without having to be responsible for the safety of other users. Then anything I see is my own fault.

I immensely appreciate your transparency on this issue and the goal to create a safe-space for people.

Originally, I didn't agree with the enacted solution... but your previous post - did add a lot of context (I'd suggest to those who don't agree with the policy change to read it first, before commenting).

I hope these moderation tools are developed quickly - so this "quick fix/nuke" can be removed.

I'm pretty new here so dunno how much it counts, but for what it's worth I think it's a good idea. I've recently seen quite a few users that have been posting from these instances and it seemed to me like they are just trying to instigate conflict or drama rather than build a community. The way they have write is aggressive and rude but not enough to break any specific rules, which must be hell to moderate. The mods here have been amazing so far so if this will help them, I'm all for it.

Besides, it shouldn't affect users too much - we can still manually go and subscribe to defederated instances and see that in the "subscribed" feed, right? This just means it's not discoverable through "All", and vice versa.

edit: I was wrong, it seems defederating completely stops content flow between instances, the things I've been seeing on subscribed page is old stuff from before the defederation. Still, a bit tricky but not insurmountable if it makes for a better sense of community in the end.

I understand that was probably a really tough decision. Props for doing what you believe in.

I really like the environment you all have set up here and only really made a lemmy.world account so I could add a couple of communities. Would you consider adding other communities in the near future if they seem reasonable?

Do you feel this is a problem solvable by moderation, or is it the unfortunate byproduct of our recent rapid growth? Do we hope to catch bad actors before they can do enough damage? Can we even sustainably grow moderation to the degree required to maintain our culture at this time? I ask to help answer some tangential questions that may arise.

I think I just reported your post not realizing it had a short cut on my keyboard, but in reality I do appreciate the post!!!! I'm Sorry!

Phew good thing I signed up with lemmy.one and not one of those. Although moving seems like it would be pretty easy at this stage in the game.

Seems like a no brainier. Great decision.

I hope we can re-federate with these communities once the teething problems and additional mod tools get sorted out.

Between what we have to work with and what I think we'd like to be, I think this checks out to be a sensible decision that I can agree with—certainly a decision I can understand, at least.

I'm of the understanding that Beehaw is striving to be a place where, among other goals, moderation is carefully measured and close to the community. I can figure that's already a pretty tall order with just the influx on Beehaw. The additional users from outside instances have got to be a difficult strain on the moderation style here, and that's assuming outside users who stumble in try to take the time to process the culture here. Between that focused moderating style and actively aiming to be a safe space, I can respect that this community may need more control over its participation.

This is a social media platform, and one built on a federated service, at that. I can understand that typically speaking, Growth Is Good for a social media platform and that platforms on federated services typically advertise themselves for their ability to easily communicate with one another. But I think Beehaw is trying to have some degree of purpose in how it cultivates itself, and another benefit to federated services that platforms typically advertise themselves with is the ability to do things their way.

Admittedly I'm not well learned enough in either of the defederated instances to personally know how much they may conflict with Beehaw's philosophy and culture, either directly or indirectly, but to fall on the grenade of potentially sounding Full Of It, Beehaw seems to aiming for a sort of Quality to its conduct that can make federation a delicate balancing act compared to typical instances. It wouldn't surprise me if this kind of discussion became a regular-ish issue that we'll have to face from time to time.

--

It'll be good to revisit this in time, even if it's only to say the likes of "we reviewed the circumstances and it seems our decision remains the best for our community because X Y and Z." If/when growth across Lemmy instances slow down, Lemmy develops more substantial and nuanced moderating tools to handle federation related issues, or if culture(s) shift one way or another to make federation seem culturally feasible, then we may be in a spot where refederation is viable.

In the meantime though, full defederation is the most viable tool we have to handle the issues brought up. I'd rather we use the chisel instead of a sledgehammer, but at the moment, all we have is the sledgehammer. I'm personally in step with what it seems like Beehaw wants to be, and I think this decision is the most agreeable with that vision.

Count me in the "support" column. Beehaw has always been very open about what it is and isn't, and all of the people who are bringing up how freedom of speech is more important than anything can find some level of explanation in Gaywallet's post/essay "Beehaw is a community". Beehaw admins/mods don't have the tools to moderate more even-handedly, so the decision to defederate for now and re-assess when more resources are available makes perfect sense to me. I'm also in the camp of "smaller and higher quality is more important than growth at any cost." This is how you can have a community where dissenting voices are allowed, such as how I've seen opinions I personally disagree with allowed to be discussed in more detail than they probably would be elsewhere. I also saw a post by someone that I believe was from one of these instances (it was either deleted or isn't viewable due to the defederation), and it was pretty clear that they were purely operating in bad faith - essentially saying that the users here are silenced and oppressed by heavy-handed moderation. For context, they also made a post elsewhere that shared information that essentially boiled down to "North Korea actually isn't bad, it's all imperialist propaganda!"

In the end, the federated nature of Lemmy means I can just create another account elsewhere if I feel the need to interact with the defederated instances. Jerboa (my main way of using Lemmy) makes it pretty quick and easy to add multiple accounts, so it really wouldn't be much of a hassle.

Sounds like y'all are taking the steps needed to protect your community, even if it's a bit inconvenient.

Unfortunate situation, but I understand the lack of tools to deal with it left you guys no choice.

Do you happen to know how long this defederation is going to take? Or rather, are tools being developed as we speak or still being discussed? Im glad this is temporary yet if its gonna be like this for years itd prove to be very limiting and isolating.

I also understand its not easy to give the mod position to anyone who requests it, but id encourage you to look for the right people in a more vehement manner. It would be downright frustrating if this situation happens again due to a lack of manpower.

One last thing: The defederation being effective Inmediately was very detrimental to users who subscribed to comms from those instances. Its already shocking to lose access to a comm you were a part of, a heads up and a couple hours/a day would help many of us be at least aware of the situation and not be blindsighted by it. I understand the pressure to do it asap, but i still think it should be notified beforehand.

And now I don't know what communities I've lost off my subscriptions. Great.

Keep up the good work. Situations like this are complex and messy and sometimes you do what needs doin.

Sounds as though instances need a permissions or one-way blocking system so that users can still read content while losing their posting priveledges. This would be at the risk of making the whole federation thing even more confusing, of course.

Thank you for this in the short term. Not gonna lie, I was a little grossed out by all the furry / anime porn / gone wild stuff that was crossing my feed when I hit all. No matter how fast I blocked the communities, I couldn't get them all. I'm not a prude person at all but I also don't come here to surf random porn.

Wow, I missed all the drama! Was spending time in Aussie Zone reconnecting with people from the r/melbourne daily thread now that we've recreated our safe and supportive familiar community over there (the mods of Reddit decided to nuke our sub at short notice and we were devastated!) I came back here to this drama, and frankly I understand it fully after spending some time quickly looking at Lemmy world (I was told there was a Bluey community there, and as an Aussie I was interested in checking it out and looked through the posts, comments etc to get a feel of it). Hooo boy, that's definitely a different vibe, especially after the wholesomeness of Beehaw generally and my old submates. It's not overly harmful but not a vibe I'd like here. I left quickly. I support the decision you've made.

I'm kinda wondering if this will end up being the case with kbin as well? lots of redditors are coming here, albeit less than are going to lemmy I think?

This is definitely the right move for this community.

It struck me yesterday as I was scrolling through through all communities how much crap there is and how the quality of community engagement is...lacking.

When I engage with content and community through the lens of beehaw, I want it to remain pure to that ideal. But I don't want that to always be my experience. If that means creating another account, well, that makes sense. Different accounts for different experiences.

Will it be annoying to switch between them? Slightly. But that's life at its best: slightly annoying.

Understandable, but still sad.

You do what you need to do. I expect a level of volatility for the next few months, if not more. It will all work out.

As an aside, if we want to recommend someone, who do we ping? My husband signed up yesterday, and I wanted to just confirm he is who he says he is. He’s not a displaced Redditor, but rather his jam is typically Fark, but all the things I was telling him got him interested in Beehaw.

im not adding to the discussion, i just want to give a quick opinion.

i know this isn't the ideal solution, but the admins are limited right now. there was a post from one of the admins that highlighted the importance of trust. i trust our admins to do what's best right now.

@alyaza I know this move might not be received well by users across the Fediverse including some in Beehaw, but I support it. Do whatever must be done.

You are trying to curate a space for genuine, positive and meaningful interaction and it's probably a huge (and continually increasing) headache to moderate users from the Open Signup instances. It's just a handful of you spending a significant chunk of your time to achieve this vision, I know you are doing everything you can to maintain this.

Keep on keeping things to a level you and the admins can handle. I already had the heads-up you were prepared to take drastic measures to deal with the huge influx of users. Take your time, and take it easy on yourselves.

Plus thanks to federation I can just use my lemmy.ca account if I get bored of stuff here. Things have been quite lively around these parts lately and even beehaw itself has about tripled its userbase since last week so I'm not too upset by this.