Beehaw defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

Seems like beehaw is doing everything they can to isolate themselves from the community. They seem to have good intentions but they are way too uptight.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25114

Called this becoming an issue on my first day here. Beehaw seems like a very sensitive group of people. Which is fine but just means we need to restart some of the popular communities they had on more open-minded servers.

I feel that I should also mention that I understand and respect the rationale given by the beehaw admins for defederation. I think they made the correct decision for their community. Just kinda sucks for us.

I think the general perspective on beehaw needs to change. There's no way they can realistically continue to maintain the largest communities on the threadiverse with only four mods and this is exactly why they should have never let themselves get in that position in the first place.

Gotta say this being one of my first impressions of lemmy... Its not great. Beehaw had a large tech and gaming section that I literally only just subbed too.

That... didn't last long. It's a shame as a lot of the communities I subscribe to are there, but I don't have an interest in joining a restrictive instance like theirs. This really highlights the fragility of these self-hosted instances and the platform in general.

None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate most of the largest communities on the threadiverse with four mods for ALL communities.

I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.

One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.

I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren't there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to technology@beehaw.org, but now it's defederated I'd expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.

Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.

It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.

Mod heavy people always talk about this supposedly huge influx of trolls, toxicity, spam that they have to moderate, but I just don't see it. I'm not sure that I have seen even a single post that obviously needed to be moderated this week. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right communities?

All the generic subs like news and technology were there. This is nuts. Glad it happened now. That server of snowflakes needs to not be promoted.

That's pretty big. I wasn't a huge fan of everything they were doing, though. From all the communities I saw from Beehaw, they were all generic, cookie cutter ones that seemed to be trying to fill the default subs from Reddit. Gaming, Politics, Space, etc. All simple ones with the same icons and everything. I assume they were all ran by the same group of people, which loses the community feel I appreciate about most other instances.

I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It's about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don't need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren't in this with us.

Beehaw leadership really seem hellbent on isolating Beehaw from the entire rest of the fediverse.

As I was posting in the other thread, they are blocking almost 300 communities and the reason for these last two is that having four mods they can't keep up with the huge influx of users. What is worse, they call it temporary until there are better moderation tools, but reading further what they hope for is the ability to block external users while allowing theirs to browse other communities

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

So i guess that this solves the big problem short term. The influx has been the first growing pain. But long term it does nothing. They will get caught defederating from smaller instances over and over. Anyone that jumps in from smaller instances will be able to carry on, at least how i understand it. The cream will rise to the top eventually, but such a strong declaration so early isnt a good sign. If the mods from any large instance decide that "this is too much, ban them" is the best response, the lemmy community is destined to be a fractured mess, rather than a reddit killer or a reddit refugee state.

I guess, imo, i get it. 100% understand from a moderation point of view. But im frustrated that there is this big of a fold the first week of real volume. The cesspool will exist in any instance. But going thermobaric this early leads to nukes next week. And it may be a sign of why a strong corporate arm and direction, as much as we hate it, is currently the winning scenario. Unfederated control is powerful. The hydra has been unleashed, but for each head you cut off, three more appear.

Honestly, they all seemed insufferable. Just pure toxic positivity. Im glad they're gone.

So just like that a bunch of communities I'm subscribed to are gone? I guess I could make another account on beehaw but this is quickly becoming more trouble than it's worth. I've broken my Reddit addiction. Maybe it's time to leave lemmy before I get attached.

Interested to see what they mean by bad behavior? Also, what a terrible, dumb decision. Beehaw always seemed like it was ran by uptight former big subreddit mods.

This is still a new system. There's gonna be some fuss. Expect for not everything to go perfectly all the time.

This is computers. Sometimes it's just necessary to turn something off, wait a bit, and turn it on again.

Seems weird to me they’re de-federating from world but not from the very problematic ml.

this sucks, specially as someone that was ghosted (assume denied) on beehaw signup, I'm glad that instances such as lemmy.world exist where I have the chance to post before assuming I'm an undesirable.

I haven’t seen anything suspect coming from either of those instances yet; quite the opposite.

This is surprising, but oh well. We can rebuild, we have the technology.

ah, this issue again. well, back to reddi... or not. :( bellow this is harsh opinion, sorry

Just want to vent , sorry if this rubs some people in the wrong way.

They should have instead focused on fewer communities. If what they built was organic at all i don’t think they would have this problem,

but.. the lack of tooling is rough. We need mod tools, mod queues, mod bots, mod discussions and all that stuff

maybe one day..

Has anyone created replacements for the major Beehaw communities yet?

Let them do it, they'll be forgotten soon. They pulled that off with lemmygrad first citing hardcore communism as a reason, mmkay it's understandable, and now they're doing it with lemmy.world because... federation turned out to be something they didn't really want? The moderation excuse is very weak, many would have volunteered to help the moderation scale.

A regrettable but completely understandable action. I think this highlights the need for improved moderation tools in Lemmy. Right now the only available option is a sledgehammer of defederation which nobody is happy with. Instances absolutely have the right to protect their members in whatever ways they deem appropriate, this is the benefit of a decentralized platform, but we clearly need more granular options.

They should reverse this decision. This is not good.

It's weird they are touting their sign up process.

I tried to sign up on Beehaw multiple times on multiple days and could never complete the process despite manually typing out answers to their inane questions several times. Some of the times it would just time out. When it would go through, I'd never get a response on my account.

So I ended up on lemmy.world.

And let's be honest, it's not like ChatGPT couldn't generate responses to those questions. In a certain sense, maybe them self-quarentining is a good thing for this and other reasons. I guess that's also part of the point of federation vs a single entity in control of everything.

There are similar "defaults" on Lemmy.ml to what is on Beehaw and I imagine communities will spring up here if you need ones to subscribe to. I imagine this could cause Beehaw's general communities to lose sway over time outside the ones specific to their instance.

Shoot, I kinda liked their Technology and News communities to keep up to date. Those were active enough. I like the whole decentralized nature of Lemmy, but this shows that it is really important to join an instance where you will be the most active on. Sure you can have multiple accounts for each instance, but that is a pain in the ass. Unsubscribed from the Beehaw communities for now.

I don’t get it, if i see a troll, i just block them and move on with life. Beehaw users have the ability to block things themselves no?

Their Literature sublemmy was enjoyable. The alternatives are just too small to have discussions at the moment. Let's see if a proper replacement arises.

...and I joined this instance because it federated with more or less everyone. It didn't last long.

This sucks, and might be the reason I return to Reddit. This pretty much splits the Lemmy population in two halves

kind of disappointing to see, considering they had some very large communities across the feddiverse.

If they were trying to do something like tildes with the small, curated user base, they probably shouldn't have federated at all. this is just going to hold community growth back for the other instances

Sorry to hear that. I enjoyed your communities.

I hope that this doesn't lead to fracturing the way it apparently did on Mastodon, where every instance that federated with a set of known-bad instances was itself added to the list of "known-bad" instances that the main instances ought to de-federate from (or maybe it will have to be that way to keep out the trolls); to put it another way, I hope that whichever side ends up being the more useful one in this split (beehaw.org or lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works) is the one that midwest.social gets to keep federating with, if it comes to that, or else I'll need to bother joining beehaw or sh.itjust.works directly.

(I forget whether I had to go through an involved process to register on midwest.social, but I know it's not one of the instances with open registration.)

Oh well, I was subbed into a couple beehaw communities but wasn't really active in them anyways.

Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.

Welp. This was fun while it lasted I guess.

I think the only way around stuff like this is to have some alts hanging around. This account is an alt to the same-name lemmy.ml account, but now only the lemmy.ml account can see beehaw stuff. It's a shame, because beehaw did seem to have something good going with their more curated communities. They could have put out a call for moderators if that's what they need, but instead they decided to close the gates.

I wouldn't be afraid to make a bunch of alts. Simply having an alt account doesn't put strain on the servers. It's the using it that does. Until then, it can lie in wait, inactive, without much impact.

So what does defederation mean in practice? I can still see communities on beehaw im subbed to. Is it just that I won't see new ones? Or that I can't search/comment on them?

For some reason I am still seeing beehaw posts here. Is it a transitional thing?

I know I'm late to the discussion but why is lemmy.world showing up on beehaw instances? They refederated?

Good fuckem

Funny. 1 week after I replied - I just now got my rejection email

This kills Lemmy, I guess? It's not practical for the second and third largest instances to defederate - it just creates two separate networks depending on which side people pick.

It was nice while it lasted, but I can't see Lemmy surviving this.

Kinda sucks, but after reading their and other people's posts and comments, I guess it's just their decision to help them in better moderating their community. Hopefully when things get calmer and everyone talks it out, we can refederate with them one day. I'm not a mod of anything so I can't really talk about that aspect, but it seems that mod tools are lacking in lemmy in general, but then lemmy is still pretty young and has lots of room for improvement.

This link was missing from this thread: How the beehaw defederation affects us

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