Agreed, it sucks. But their admins are talking to our admins, and so far ours seem like they have their heads screwed on pretty well, so I'm sure it'll only be for a short time.
Oust the shitheads, promote the stand-up sh.it.heads, I say.
To be honest I had no idea that people from this instance were doing it until one troll post bragging about getting us banned from Beehaw and explained how he did it, along with a comic book supervillian diatribe about how the Fediverse isn't safe and long live Reddit.
I mean the easy solution is to have your instance enable registration screening. That's what it's for. It takes less than a minute to answer most instances' registration yet (based on experience) that simple barrier is enough to stop most trolls.
Until a Lemmy instance gets large enough to actually hire full time admins to catch and remove abusive content ASAP, I don't see instances reasonably being able to go without registration screening because the trolls will seize on that opportunity every time.
Admins of larger instances see it all the time:
New instance pops up, yay! And most instances automatically federate with new instances!
It doesn't have registration screening, this is quickly discovered by trolls and adbots and the instance gets filled with rule breaking content.
Large instances start blocking it because by federating with an instance that is being used in this way degrades the quality of your own instance and adds a ton of workload to your (unpaid) mods and admins.
The instance eventually enables registration screening, and other instances start unblocking it.
It's happened with plenty of instances before and will probably keep happening as long as spam and trolling exist.
welcome to the fediverse! Before you get "locked in" to a particular instance, take a look at your other choices and pick one that you might fit better in. https://fediverse.observer
When other instances have abstract requirements and a manual approval process that takes who-knows-how-long, though, that's not always such an easy ask. People want to be where other people are, and those busier instances are the ones that set harder requirements.
When I left Reddit, I signed up on two instances: lemmy.ml and beehaw. I was eventually approved for lemmy.ml, but even now trying to access beehaw just hangs on the login page perpetually, presumably because I have not been approved and there's nothing else I can do on my end.
Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't feel great, but I didn't get the sense that they were trying to personally attack everyone on the relevant servers, but more of a "we're only four people, did not expect our instance to become a "default" community, and are completely underwater from a moderation perspective. We need to pull a rip cord to get this under control"
The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.
I am not 100% sure where you are going with this, however I am going to say I agree that the move by beehaw is a blatent move to exert control on other instances, and it was never in question, in my mind atleast that it was their goal from my reading of their first post. I however disagree that they pose a threat to the other istances, they pose a threat if instances give in, like it apears sh.itjust.works may have done given their new post. Beehaw, sense the begining has been going arround acting like they have quite a bit like they are the arbitor, and everyone else should join them. I for one think the other instances of Lemmy should band together and let Beehaw wall themselves off. I do not think they would sucseed in this goal, and they would either give up on their imperialistic conquest or they would die a death of isolation.
it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn't aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.
Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation.
It's just that network effects are real. I want to be where all the smart, fun people are, not on a ded site or nazi island. I don't really care about who's on my instance, just who's on the network. Federation and decentralization were never huge selling points for me. And as Mastodon demonstrated, most people just want to log onto a big network and don't care or want to think about instances.
Beehaw.org, one of the largest instances suddenly decided to also defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works....
They are becoming an incredibly insular community which would normally be fine...but the frustrating bit is that many of us have been enjoying and participating in content from many instances and then suddenly it gets taken away from us.
If they had defederated from the very beginning or if they were a much smaller community it wouldn't be as frustrating imo.
I just want to be able to interact with people, not keep jumping through hoops to find which instances support other instances and making new accounts there.
You'd be better off without them, they (the runners of the instance, not the userbase) are a bunch of absolutely cowardly little liars. They were more than happy to accept the massive boon this instance gave them and at the same time agitate and concern troll here to try to drive a wedge in the userbase. I find that shit deeply irritating, especially since they claim to be apolitical and merely blocking instances for "hate speech" which (aside from being a political concept) was seemingly the false pretext they have for also blocking hexbear.net, which is currently forked but is the only instance with substantial usership to mandate pronouns and has much more aggressive anti-racist moderation.
If you simper enough, I'm sure they'll be happy to have you back since they seem the type to feel they are never receiving enough sycophantic flattery, but that's a bad trade for you.
Exactly. Politics affect every little instance of your daily lives, from the taxes you pay, through the type of food you buy (local or imported?), to the sex of people you can get married to.
AFAIK that's just standard link terminology. Any . followed by two characters is automatically interpreted as a link. It's been that way on Twitter for quite a while.
Basically, Beehaw defederated from some newer instances. Partially because some people were being shitheads, but for other understandable reasons as well.
The moral of the story is, it's ok to be a sh.it.head, it's not ok to be a shithead. Not the same.
hey, I have been here awhile, and while I am not 100% sure the exact issue that triggered this, what I can tell you is generaly the beehaw admin team has shown themselves not to be the most trust worthy team when it comes to lemmy instances, so I would take their story with a grain of salt