YSK: If you're on Lemmy.World or Sh.itjust.works you should not subscribe to any Beehaw communities

It's important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.

They point wasn't to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member--who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance--from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody's happy with the situation, but it's the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.

I also don't think it's wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.
That's true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
- This isn't reddit 2.0. It's a different platform with different mechanics that hasn't had over a decade to mature.
  Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
- I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it's not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
  I also question what it's going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that "you can always go to another instance".
  Ultimately it's not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That's a huge opportunity for suppression that I don't trust certain admins not to abuse.
- That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
  It's not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it's the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it's possible to.
  I'm on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
- I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be "members" and missing the s is a typo.
- I think they just dropped the s off members.

It's getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, "good" or "bad"), that's their prerogative.

If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.

One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.

TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you're not.

Ah, in less than 48 hours we've come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I'm entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I'd rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
- It's not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw's moderation ability.
- If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
  I think it was pretty clear, yeah
- Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
  The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
I'm criticizing people criticizing people for criticizing people who criticize people who criticize....
You're just as tiring as the people you're criticizing.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
- Don't worry about it, sh.itjust.works is a popular instance and Beehaw just want to do their own thing. Unless there's a specific community hosted on Beehaw that you really want to be a part of you probably won't notice, as most popular subjects have communities on other servers.
- Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that's reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
- Shitjustworks was defederated from Beehaw, if you absolutely want to be able to post on Beehaw, you'll have to create an account there, otherwise you should have access to every other instances federated to shitjustworks
Ah, in less than 48 hours we've come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we've come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we've come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.

Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There's no conspiracy here to break federation.

Beehaw is some pseudo moral purity echo chamber. They consider anyone with a contrary opinion a troll. People create these "safe spaces" under the guise of protecting minority groups, but fuck.. I'm a minority, and I knew immediately I wasn't going to be welcome there.
People are free to judge it as they please.
--edit--
Why aren't other instances having this problem? Like if trolls and spam are such an issue, why do I only see relevant on topic comments in other instances?
The issue isn't trolls, it's political dissent. And if you care about the truth, if you care about having the ability to talk about and express your ideas freely to other people, to have uncomfortable discussions with people you disagree with, to be exposed to new ideas, and fuck.. to possibly even change your mind, you shouldn't support beehaw.
If you genuinely want that type of environment, go for it, but that place should be called out for what it is.
This type of political authoritianism is why I left Reddit. It kills discussion, and I'm here for critical discussion.
- Why would you not be welcome? Is it for your political opinions? Even if it were, I don't think they would personally shun you unless it entails attacking minorities.
  That aside, and having said that of course it is everyone's perrogative to judge this behavior, I personally feel it is an exaggeration. Not every instance is about free speech nor should they be, at the end of the day the fediverse is about creating communities, one is able and should shape them into what their vision of that is. This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
  Even if it weren't for that, it is good that communities don't federate with every instance, aa I said, not everyone is about free speech and changing opinions some are here to have a good time and for that adequate protection is necessary.
  I myself prefer deciding myself when to block other instances, so I joined one that let's users decide. But if other instances decided to block us I would understand and either move on or join another instance to interact with them without thinking much about it (having multiple accounts is kind of easy on the apps,)
  I think I'm kind of used from servers blocking one another from my time on mastodon and I've seen the necessity of the practice, for example an anime focused group blocking bot instances, brigading, alt right groups, etc.
- Beehaw lost me when admins allowed a female user to repeatedly insult men, say 95% of them are awful, that men shouldn’t even exist etc they claim they’re a “safe, welcoming space” but it’s actually hypocritical.
  They defederated from this and other instances and yet I’ve never seen any comments reaching that level of hostility here. The only way to interpret that is that they actually are okay with insults and bigotry as long as it suits their whims. If a man had made the same remarks it’d be written off as the rantings of an incel and they’d likely be banned.
  I should be their target audience as someone who has voted left my entire life and it’s too much and too controlled for me. Either they’re for all equality and inclusiveness or they’re not. Pick one.
Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw's modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
- Safe spaces are pretty much that. I would actually like to join beehaw if I ever need to switch to an instance for my own sanity. I left reddit but it's followed us here so I think a more curated experience would be nice.
  That is unless they're nazis, fascists, authoritarian or any other kind of violent extremist faction. I'm sick of having no faith in humanity because of all these backwards ideologies being "expressed". To quote Costanza, these pretzels are making me thirsty.
- Yep, I applied to join when I was fresh and it asks about how active applicants are. I was honest and said I wasn't the most active person but that I did participate in the subs that I used the most. Was trying to be honest and didn't see any red flags with that. They still denied me, so fuck beehaw
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don't want to see communities I can't interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
- They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.

Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can't talk to them.

For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
- Unless you're ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
- You can still communicate with other people from your own instance.
I guess we will just have to take their word on that refederation thing
- As a member of Beehaw I haven't seen any reason not to trust them so far. They've been transparent about why it was done and they've spoken with other instance admins.
  Think we have to be conscious that this is all still at an early stage and generally it's wise to give people the benefit of the doubt at first. I get the cynicism but this isn't a privatised space- people across lemmy have been constructive and open so far, so maybe give them a chance?
- They've already been talking to the admins of those instances, they did it because there weren't better options like in Mastodon, remember that Lemmy is still Alpha software
Yeah I don't see any issue with having conversations with each other even if the beehaw folks never see it
is there a list of beehaw community? how do I know which community is from beehaw?
this is a bit confusing but I will prevail
- The community name will be !something@beehaw

And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.

set up shop on an instance
Don't do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.
This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc's basket. All our content is under Reddit's control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It's annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.
We shouldn't be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn't have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn't be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.
Also, I'm on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven't defederated from anyone, and I believe we're still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don't), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.
Why don't you have a second account?
Lazy. Don't care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn't rely on centralized social media.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1571
this is why i plan to host my own federated instance - no pissing matches can be had, and i can federate with any larger ones that i like/pick up steam.
I'm genuinely curious of a real answer on this as I have the same concerns having registered on InfoSec.pub. Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community? What happens to my account if they shutter? It's not like I can login using Lemmy.ca as my community.
As cool as this is, it's not fully thought through IMHO. There's a reason centralization tends to occur naturally. We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances? I'm lazy I'll get around to digging more eventually but right now this is a curiousity.
- Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?
  There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that's in the works.
  We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?
  Someone that's not spez.
  There's no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can't fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you're on gets taken over by assholes, it's going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you're on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.
  Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they'd either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.
  It's a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren't assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.
  Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn't have. Does having additional options make a system worse?
- This argument is absurd. What happens, right now, if Reddit shuts down? Where can you take your account to access what’s on Reddit?
  The fact is federations CAN be set up this way. Lemmy is new and the people providing the service are working to get things functional as fast as possible. Federating authentication is possible. Can you do it right this second? Nope.
  Can you do it with Reddit right this second?
  “I’m not gonna do this because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.” News flash, Reddit doesn’t work that way either, while you’re not doing it on Reddit…. Lemmy CAN work that way, Reddit… yah good luck.
  I get it, mediocrity now is better than improvements later…
- What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
  If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
  But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
  All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
  You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.
  You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in
  I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
  Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just
  Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further
- What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
  If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
  But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
  All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
  You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.
  You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in
  I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
  Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just
  Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further q
- What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
  If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
  But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
  All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
  You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.
  You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in
  I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
  Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just
  Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further
And it's extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you're a member of one of their 'blessed' federated friends.
- largest tech community in the fediverse
  TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I'd had my tech feed basically covered
I think it has positives. and the negatives can be adressed with new features like a federated identity . something that could allow you to keep accounts on multiple servers combining subscriptions deduping content and letting you control what user to use to interact.
This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I've been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It's kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I'm going to see when I switch to each account. It's also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone's opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won't be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.
There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don't like, but that's a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It's actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone's traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.
But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don't have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.
Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You'd be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it's been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn't show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.
I'm not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I'm done now.
- I don't really like this approach because it's not personally customizable and wouldn't be very straightforward. I'd prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
I mean, I was on Beehaw when this happened so had to move my account. It took ten minutes to manually copy over all my subscriptions (and I believe there are automated ways to do that now). Hardly the end of the world 🤷‍♀️
No. This is just a problem that hasn't been solved yet! It will be in time haha.
Head back to Reddit the way you came then, friend.
- No, discussion is welcome here. Even mine, even yours.

I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true "read only" understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.

I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
- I'm starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Yeah I would agree with this. It's good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
Can we actually see the posts from people at Beehaw?
- I was subbed to some communities from before defederation. I also have a accounts at a few instances for discovery.

@SteelBeard@lemmy.world , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.

Those are good points. Time to find a different instance. My account is not precious. Supporting a sustainable growth is.
The slowness of Lemmy.world to defederate from the fascists, and now this makes me feel I can find a better home. A home that is a better partner to the fediverse.
- I will be curious to learn what works best for you.
tldr; too hard to mod. That's pretty dumb, but the cool thing with the fedi is you can just not care and swap instances.
- Mod work in general is going to be a tough issue for everyone to solve. Different places will have different norms they want to enforce, and a limited volunteer staff to push that agenda. But there's nothing that can't be automated. Automate the creation of AI mods, automate the selection of user mods, automate the banning of objectionable comments and users using a combination of both humans and AI to both handle the workload and adhere to community regulations. If these tools can be developed as part of lemmy, automated moderation can become an available option for all instances, which hopefully will mean that moderation here will be better quality and lower cost than moderation on that other social media site, I'm forgetting the name.
- You may find that we really like safe spaces on Lemmy.

Most normal users won't care about any of this because it'll shake itself out quickly as has happened with Mastodon. But if you do care, join up with a smaller server that plays nice with everybody and enjoy the whole fediverse.
- this, then :
  Selfhosting
Last I checked, their reason for defederating is to avoid the high influx of new wildcard users from large instances without vetting processes.
As for the radical echo chamber part, I can't say for sure because I didn't actually interact with them but I recall the term they make you agree to apply for an account was somewhat vague, possibly allowing arbitrary bans to enforce an echo chamber.
They pretend to defend their users from 'bad' instances. Until users are happy at 1984 instance (beehaw is even worst) that's okay, otherwise there are still options to register at some normal instance, which let users decide themselves what they should see or not.
- It has nothing to do with defending their users and they never even fucking claimed that was what it was about. You are making shit up to be mad about, JFC.

Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I've been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I'm just winging it here. thanx!

The community name will end in “@beehaw”.
If you go to the community search bar and search for say, “gaming” you’ll get multiple results. The one that’s just “gaming” is your home instance, any with an “@instancename” behind them are from elsewhere.
- okay, that makes it easy. Thanx for replying!
- Also their icons are pretty recognizable, I think they are all yellow honeycombs.

I don’t understand: did something serious happened, or it’s them overreacting?

It's just down to Lemmy not having good enough mod tools yet. Beehaw is a carefully curated walled garden instance that hosts some high quality communities; they are availing themselves of the only real tool they have to curb an influx of bad actors from other instances.
Here's hoping its temporary. The admin team here at sh.itjust.works clearly operates in good faith.
- They have stated as much, and are open to refederating once the mod tools can handle the influx of people joining instances with open sign-ups. Side effect of the reddit refugee crisis.
- but why bother? they can still enter from any of the thousands of other instances that allow free registration. if they want to troll, they are still able to do that.
They defederated because they were both large Lemmy instances with zero review process for joining users, and they'd rapidly starting acquiring bots and bad actors. Because of federation, these accounts could interact on Beehaw's server like they were locals.
Beehaw on the other hand, has a human-powered review process for signup. It isn't strict, but it keeps out bots or low-effort users. Beehaw's community goal means that reducing the amount of bots, bad actors, and low-effort users on the platform is a priority for them. Their moderating is also human-powered, and very involved - not outright banning/blocking. They reach out to users to discuss their content's intent, and issue warnings/requests personally as needed.
That level of moderation is fantastic for fostering community and is compassionate for ignorance and error; but it isn't scalable when being hammered by bots and an influx of new accounts. Beehaw's only protection from instances that shelter bots and bad actors was to defederate from them until those instances were able to address them somehow.
The Beehaw admins have reached out to the admins of the other instances; their hope is to find a solution that reduces the amount of bots and spam accounts creating on .world and .works. They don't want defederation to be a permanent solution, it's just the only feasible one they had.
- There sign up process was nearly successful in putting me off from ever trying Lemmy. I almost gave up finding instances which would let me join without filling in a completely stupid form where I have to state what communities I will join when I haven't even had a chance to get to know what communities are out there!!.
The admins of beehaw are more Liberal (if you are anywhere in the LGBTQIA+ space the other side's content is largely considered offensive enough to defederate from) and presumably the other way around.
Annoyingly I guess it all comes around to politics and which side of history you want to be on. Personally I'm all for letting other people be in charge of whatever the fuck they want to do with their life - to an extent - but context matters
Boozilla's comment explains in better detail and I 100% recommend a read to gain a better understanding. Basically the moderation tools on Lemmy aren't quite up to stuff yet
- I don't know anything about the issue being that Beehaw is too liberal, only that some other instances were 1. Too easy to make accounts on and 2. Allowing an influx of super right/downright nazi punks to start spamming without any serious moderation.

I reckon this will hurt Lemmy in the long run

Not if @whenigrowup356@lemmy.world is correct.

Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).

From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).

It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.

Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.

Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?

I recommend reading Beehaw’s statement: https://beehaw.org/comment/263590
As it is just text on a screen, I think there are more and less generous ways to read the post. But I think a lack of scalable mod tools (to combat an internet-sized influx of “bad actors”) is a reasonable (and hopefully temporary) rationale for defederation.
- Having read this, I get what they’re going for, but also question the venue a bit.
  With Lemmy being about federation, it sounds like they want to have a de federated mini Lemmy to themselves where they can decide who is allowed in or not. Not that that is a bad thing, if there’s a demand for it, but I think it’s different than what every other instance is about and maybe would be better as something like a Discord server (or FOSS alternative).
  Again just my 2c, I just know I’m looking for a better quality alternative to Reddit, and an isolated instance isn’t my cup of tea.
- I think it's also important for the this context to understand what beehaw is. They are an instance specifically created to be a more friendly, empathetic community. That made them a bit of a target when the migration started happening, as you might imagine.
  Ultimately, they can do whatever they want. I understand that decision might rub some people the wrong way, but in the end it's their community.
  Frankly, after seeing the downfall of other reddit alternatives like voat, I think they're justified. Young internet communities seem to be prone to being overrun by trolls and neonazis.
- Thank you for the source

Okay, guess I just won't use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.

If they're that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.

I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven't already -.-

shrugs It sounds like they'd happily refederate once the right mod tools are available.
- Seems like a pretty reasonable request. Hopefully they get the tools they're after and then everyone can be even more connected again!
- I'm sure there will be tons of volunteers for that, after instance admins make the user experience a horrible mess.
  I can't wait to create 2 more accounts to do the same thing I did with the one I already have.

this is completely reasonable, they own the instance and should be able to do whatever they want with it.

OP didn't say it was wrong. Just a tip.

I disagree simply on the basis that they hope to refederate eventually, and it might be good to already be subbed. But yeah.

I'm sure it will be announced. It will be big lemmy news, hard to miss.

Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).

If I'm on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I'm on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?

Am I understanding things correctly? If that's the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I'm wanting to browse is on?

Basically. You can browse them with the opposite account but you can't interact.
- So it's like getting banned from a subreddit, except you can't even browse with the same account after being banned?
If you get an account on an instant that isn't involved in this mess like FMHY you can browse both without any issue.
- This was my thinking.
  Is there an easy way to check if anyone has defederated from your instance?
- I might have to go here. I'm already tired of defederation and its histrionic champions.

Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?

At this point it's too early to tell how well moderation can work in the long term. I'd rather they take it slow than burn out.

Same for any expectations regarding lemmy itself.

The first post I came across from another instance was on Beehaw. It was very confusing trying to figure out the federation concept with that community being my first visit.

Anyone knows why this happened ? Hope admins dont ruin Lemmy for everyone.

When there was an influx of users during the Reddit blackout, they said that they were getting lots of trolls and they couldn't keep up with the moderation. Lemmy.world and Sh.itjust.works had the most traffic and were letting people sign up without vetting so the Beehaw admins decided to defederate those communities.
- Making it harder for people to sign up and interact with each other, during the most important week of the platform's existence, I hope they didn't take that lightly
- That's a hard action. Hopefully its temporary.
- Thanks
Just a heads up, we love our admins around here, they are great. Beehaw defederated from people because they were afraid of being able to mod everything with the influx of users with limited mod tools available. They will likely refederate eventually. For now I unsubbed from all beehaw communities and dont miss anything. The cool thing is if you do end up on an instance with admins you don't like, there are like 10,000 other instances you can go to.
But the admins here are usually pretty transparent with everything going on. They are just some dude with a server in their closet. Not some cooperation that are making decisions with profit in mind. They are doing it for the community.
Just a heads up, we love our admins around here, they are great. Beehaw defederated from people because they were afraid of being able to mod everything with the influx of users with limited mod tools available. They will likely refederate eventually. For now I unsubbed from all beehaw communities and dont miss anything. The cool thing is if you do end up on an instance with admins you don't like, there are like 10,000 other instances you can go to.
But the admins here are usually pretty transparent with everything going on. They are just some dude with a server in their closet. Not some cooperation that are making decisions with profit in mind. They are doing it for the community.
- From what I understand, admins here are literally paying out of pocket AND volunteering their time to host us. Just as when I invite my friends over to my house for a BBQ, if one of them brings a friend that starts shitting in my pool, I tell them to GTFO and probably stop hosting BBQs for a while even though my friends who DIDN'T shit in my pool still end up suffering the consequences.
  Thanks, current Fediverse admins!
beehaw's selective defederation announcement

Why?

At the time LW and SJW had few barriers to signing up, so they had a higher rate of spam coming in and the beehaw team said they couldn't keep up with moderating it. No idea if this is still the case, but they remain federated.
- SJW is a wild abbreviation
- Oh no, are we calling shitjustworks SJW now??

If you don't want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn't do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.

Defederation is always malicious. Imagine your email getting silently lost, because gmail defederated from aol.
The network has started to implode sooner than I expected. This was an interesting week and a half...
- I'm guessing you have no idea that the mods of world and shitjustwork talked with the mods at behaw, and they all agreed it was the right thing to do at the time. You obviously don't know the situation, or understand that the fediverse is not supposed to work like a centralized platform.

Is there any reason for them defederating?

Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities. The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities. There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
- That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
- That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
- I thought it was because they lacked the ability to effectively moderate.
- Oh, gardens can have diversity without being an echo chamber. As they said they don’t see another way to stop those people who like to shit in carefully created gardens.
  Nobody likes shit in their garden.
- If they wanted an echo chamber they would have defederated from all other instances.
  I'm sure they have a reason,whether it's the correct decision is another matter.
- I mean---maybe? That wouldn't necessarily be malicious, but I think it's fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed "safe space", and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.
  Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from "malicious" outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw's managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn't automatically rule out competitive motives.
  Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we're going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I'll admit that like many of us I'm very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.
  Maybe I'm dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I'm full of shit--I'll admit I basically don't know what I'm talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong--but I wonder if this isn't so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw's stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.
  EDIT: I really can't thank y'all enough for this. It feels like I'm right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it's like nothing has changed at all.
  Maybe beehaw doesn't have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.
- He says, in an instance that banned downvotes.
- And this is exactly why they have to defederate. People like you exists.
The most trolls came from those two instances since they have no criteria to joining and they have so many users, and beehaw prides itself on being a nice, safe space. Lemmy currently doesn't have the moderating tools to empower them to take care of all the new, toxic redditors, but they said they're willing to federate with them when it does, which I'm sure it will eventually.
- I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
  What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
  A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
  A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
  Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.
  Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.
  A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.
  Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.
- Progress? Either that or their site got overloaded.

This is a bit of a bummer since I'm interested in a lot of the beehaw communities. Should users just make separate accounts to interact with beehaw communities?

a lot of the beehaw communities have alternatives in the rest of the lemmyverse. while I can participate in beehaw communities, i personally found it more useful to just block all beehaw communities (so I don't accidentally post there) and participate in the non-beehaw communities so I'm interacting with the majority of the fediverse.
most of the other instances are low-drama and don't have issues with defederating/shadowbanning like beehaw does!
- There's no reason you can't have it both ways. Ban behaw here, and join beehaw there, if you feel any fear of missing out.
  I think that's one of the best things about federation. You get to taste both options. If they're right about high-admission instances leading to lower quality content, the only way to know it is to be in both places. Thankfully, we can.
If you want to interact with both beehaw and Lemmy.world you need to find an instance that federates with both.
My instance (iusearchlinux.fyi) does, but so does a lot of other instances too.
I've tried a couple times to create an account there and been denied.
I use a separate account for Beehaw but ever since they defederated I haven't seen as much activity on there.
- Makes sense. The problem with their approach was it basically punished people on Beehaw rather than people on the instances they deem problematic. I see what they're trying to do and have absolutely no problem with it, but I and most people I'd got to know there just moved to another instance so we could interact outside the walled garden. Whereas my account on .world was unaffected because there's alternatives to all the Beehaw stuff elsewhere.
- Sounds like a double-edged sword. High admittance rate may mean spammier as well as trollier content, but low admissions and blacklisting other instances means people will move their stuff to where they expect more people to see it.
Yes.
Yeah lemmy.world has a more open sign up which is a double edged sword. It's good in that it's easier to set up an account and start talking.
But the other side of it is that it's also easier for shitty people to sign up. The kind of people that will say shitty things to the LGBTQ+ communities on beehaw.
So yeah, you might want to consider signing up for an account on an instance that's a little more selective. You'll probably have to write up a few paragraphs introducing yourself, and it might take a little time for it to be reviewed.
- AI is going to mess with that process so fast I'd be surprised if that hasn't happened already. While it seems unavoidable, still probably a good idea to have the personal question text box for now. But it seems like only a stopgap. We'll need something better.
  But how do you proceduralize moderation? Even though it will raise operation costs, it might be necessary to host our own AI on the back end of each opted-in instance, and provide the tools to train it on content that the admins of that instance find objectionable.
  There would be growing pains of course, where some of our comments are held to be reviewed by participating moderators, who are themselves selected by an AI trained on content the admins of the instance find to be exceptional. And it would help to label and share the tensors we mine from this, so a new instance could gain access to a common model and quickly select a few things they don't want in their instance, even giving them the ability to automatically generate a set of rules based on the options they selected when building the AI for their instance.
  It would take some time for all the instances to figure out which groups they do and don't want to connect with, both in terms of internal users and external instances. I think you'd end up with two distinct clumps of communities that openly communicate within their clump, with a bigger blurrier clump between them, of centrists, with whom most communities communicate. But on either side there would almost certainly be tiny factions clumped together, who don't communicate with most of the centrist groups, on the basis that they communicate with the other side. And there will always be private groups as well, some of which may choose their privacy on the basis that they refuse to communicate with any group that communicates with the centrist cloud.
  And in most of our minds, the two groups in question are probably political, but I think a similar pattern will play out in any sufficiently large network of loosely federated instances, even if the spectrum is what side of a sports rivalry you're on. If we get to the point where there's an instance or more in almost every household, we may be able to see these kinds of networks form in realtime.
  But the question I can't seem to answer: Is it good? Or rather, is it good enough?
  People always think of what they would do if they had a time machine and could go back and "change things." But in terms of federated social media, we already are back, almost at the start. So, if we're going to think of a better way, now would be a good time.
  If we start to see a high degree of polarization among the instances of lemmy, what is the right thing to do about that? To all turn our backs, take our content and go home, make sure they have to have accounts on our side to see it, and if they ever make a subversive comment on our side of the fence, it's removed before a human can ever see it, only spot-checked occasionally to make sure the bot is not being too harsh? Because that is one way of doing it, and maybe it's the right way. If we train the AI well enough. Which depends on many of us doing that well enough across many instances. Maybe that is how you defeat Nazis, to make sure they can only talk about Nazi things in a boring wasteland of their own design.
  But I worry. Once instances are better networked, becoming more about quantity than size, and billionaires are able to set up "instance farms" where AI bots try to influence the rest of the fediverse en masse, will we be ready to head it off? Or similar to how we can't see the Nazis crawling out from their wasteland to get higher quality memes, will we end up paling around with the bots designed to make our society trend toward slavery while their energy consumption raises the cost of the electricity we have to work for? Of course, if the bots do end up more convincingly human than humans can ever be, who am I to say they don't deserve a larger cut of our power?
Go to beehaw.org/instances to see what instances are blocked and which allowed. I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml, which I picked because it was a decent sized instance that was still federated by all the big instances. Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Just create an account with an instance that federates with both.
- Any recommendations for an instance that's unlikely to get defederated in the future?

Aren't you only "shadow banned" from users of that instance? Wouldn't folks federated with your instance still see your comments?

My understanding is that Lemmy isn’t peer-to-peer, it’s more like hub-and-spoke, relative to the instance that the community is on.
So if users on B and C are interacting with a post on A, then it’s the responsibility of A to be the postman and handle the syncing between A<>B and A<>C; B and C don’t directly talk in this case.
Thus, nobody outside of Lemmyworld sees posts from Lemmyworld made on Beehaw communities, because Beehaw doesn’t accept them, and therefore doesn’t pass them along to the other instances, either.
- I recommend reading this post on lemmy.world for a very clear understanding of how the defederation affects these instances: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Pretty sure that's right.
- That's confusing. Let's say that there is antance A, B and C. (Instance A is Beehaw) Now let's say A bans C, but not B. And B hasn't banned anyone. That would mean instance A would still see the comments of C, when replying to B, right? If so, people from Instance A would feel like they are being gaslit more then people blocked from instance C.

Well then you better block this one too, because Lemmy.world defederated from the tanky instances. In fact, most instances did.
Being able to create spaces according to your needs without having your hand forced by anyone is kind of the point of the Fediverse. Beehaw can cultivate a community that fits what they want, just like Lemmy.world. That's what it's for.
There's nothing stopping you from registering on Beehaw if you want to post there and contribute to that community. But without being able to detach themselves from instances that have open registration, there's no way to even slow trolls down. Banning would be meaningless, because you can register as many accounts as you could want.
The point of the Fediverse is decentralization and choice where the default options have been a bland toxic mess.
Personally, I enjoy both the more cultivated environment of Beehaw and the bigger community feeling of Lemmy.world, so I registered with both Beehaw and Lemmy.blahaj.zone so that i can post and read whatever.
It's not about what's better, it's about choice.

Or just ignore them and let become less popular and soon enough the important communities will move away or be replaced. I really dislike how many influence communities are in such a one dimensional instance, luckily I have already seen a few of those moving over to .world or elsewhere and I can't wait!
I like to have people with all sorts of backgrounds and opinions in my instance, not just everyone with the same black and white viewpoint!
- Yeah, it's a hard balance to follow. Of course you want full, natural diversity of people and opinions in a group. But hateful right wing toxicity is also way overrepresented online, and has to be moderated against if you don't want a niche online platform to turn into 4chan or whatever
- Yeah. Beehaw is trying to make an echo chamber and it's best to stray away from that approach.
- Yeah, many subreddits were/are getting ridiculous in this area. Silencing people is not the way. I'd rather openly discuss why something that's said was shitty then pretend the person never said it.
  This said, astro-turfing is a thing, and that is a downside to low or no moderation...
Yeah that's why defederation is pointless. Its the sticking a stick in your bike spokes meme of the fediverse.
- Depends on your use case. Since Beehaw has no open registration, but approves new users, that makes a difference.
  [...] our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
  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;
  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;
  [...]
  If you want a moderated registration process, and people can join you through the backdoor, leaving that door open is like sticking a stick in your bike spokes.
- I think in general is quite effective against instances prone to trolls or bots.
If they let you in, sure.

They basically shadowbanned us because they are lazy... jokes aside, they don't have the manpower to moderate all the bots away. At least that's their reasoning.

laughs in tiny instance

The benefit is nobody bothers to de-federate you so you can subscribe to communities/magazines everywhere, the downside is a relatively barren /all.
- That, and you have to search for communities and then subscribe to them manually - my biggest challenge rn

I mean, that is literally the purpose of fediverse and federation, right? so people can have their own little bubbles and be as connected as they wish?
How to block entire instances?
- You can't. Not unless you run your own instance of Lemmy and defederate them.
- Instance admins can do it.

I don't get it why people block whole communities because they don't agree just with a few people. Lemmy will just get divided and inaccessible.

As noted in the announcements - because mid and instance admin tool are not ready for the current scale.
I don't get
then lurk moar
That's not how federation works though; any community can defederate with another one. On different servers however, everything is still accessible even without logging in.
(Edit: Grammer and punctuation)
- Yeah. But I feel like defederation should be the last thing you want to do. People should be able to mute and block instances on their own.

I don't even think about bees

Do you have any insight why did they do that?

It was due to their (our) open admission policy.
They wanted a more curated experience, and were concerned that our instances would be full of trolls and bots
They said they would reconsider the decision later
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- Honestly that strikes me as perfectly reasonable of Beehaw.
  Maybe a little kneejerk to de-federate preemptively, but given their stated moderation goals I totally get it.
Beehaw has sign up requirements to curate the type of community they are. These other instances do not, allowing anybody.
Since any account can be used for in any instance still federated with the instance they made their account on, Beehaw was upset that their curated community was being interrupted by troves of unregulated members of the large, general servers. The tools for moderating Lemmy are also still in their infancy, so the Beehaw moderators were finding it harder to do their jobs.
So they defederated for the time being.
- Communities need ways of adding restrictions to posting. Some reddit communities used stuff like Karma counts to prevent bots from joining or even account ages. Eventually bots and spammers found ways around it such karma farming using reposts or using tools like chatGPT to generate post topics that might trick legitimate posters to upvote..
  I don’t know of a foolproof way to prevent all spammers, but some kind of tooling is needed to help moderate communities and filter out obvious spammers and trolls
Yeah, where's !/c/lemmydrama?
- Drama only exists when people aren't kind to each other. So, no thanks?

Why have they done that? Has Lemmy World done something? Or are they trying to keep themselves exclusive?

- Ah ok, thanks for that. That's a shame though, so far what I've seen of Lemmy has been so much less toxic than Reddit, you'd hope it wasn't necessary for them to defederate. However if they feel it is necessary, then fair enough I guess.
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- Thanks, that's really interesting and a good explanation from them. Appreciate the share.
  Ironically, I couldn't initially open the link in my app, probably because the defederation! Got it to open in a browser though.
They're curating a particular community to try to avoid trolls and shitposters and lemmy.world was growing so fast that they didn't have the mods or tools to keep everything in line to their satisfaction on their own instance. Once they're happy with their mod abilities they'll probably refederate.
Since Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had fully opened sign ups with no vetting during the big migration, Beehaw was getting a lot of trolls and spammers coming from those instances. Since Lemmy is kind of new there weren't enough moderation tools for them to fully deal with that with their team so they defederated until those tools exist.

Is there some way to just not see the remnants of communities from defederated instances?

Block them individually. There's no way currently to block an instance as a user.

I was under the impression that when Beehaw chose to defederate, it only broke the community link. I thought that someone on lemmy.world could still see the local cached versions of posts, and could even continue posting content. However, only lemmy.world users would see the new comments as the local cache isn't pushed back to the Beehaw post.

What I'm still unclear on is if sh.itjust.works users could see lemmy.world posts to a cached Beehaw post. My guess is no, right? If Beehaw was still federated, the Lemmy.world user post would be synced to the Beehaw post, and then this would be synced to the sh.itjust.works local cache. Is there a mesh feature to Lemmy? Where the local cache of sh.itjust.works will sync comments from the local cache of lemmy.world comments to a beehaw post?

Well this didn't take long to start spiraling

Right!! They made it seem like it was open but they have drama too. lol

Well they can keep to themselves. But are they trying to be the Amish of Lemmy or a large scale version of r/historians?

No they were getting a large influx of trolls and spam from communities with open sign ups so they temporarily defederated as a way to protect the instance. Not sure I wouldve made the same call but I can absolutely understand why they did it and we shouldn't have any ill will towards beehaw at all in my opinion.

Beads?

Gob's not on board.
- They don't allow you to have bees in here.
Yeah, can someone please tell me how this is going to effect our bead business?

What are you talking about? The apps all allow multi login. So why is this an issue?

Why does Lemmy make it look harder than it is? It's not a massive load compared to what modern servers and applications are designed to handle.

I couldn't sign up on beehaw and lemmy.ml after multiple tries. It feels worse than a simple centralised platform one can build in a month.

Is there alternative to reddit for people like me who don't need this kind of decentralisation (Lemmy feels like centralisation, just multiple number of it, if any instance can cut off like this.) but likes the (text heavy)interface of Lemmy?

Unfortunately, they all seem to have died to the "Nazi bar" problem or other issues. A centralised Lemmy variant would likely either lurch to the extreme right, or be rapidly pumped for profit, like Reddit is doing.
One of the advantages of federation is the ability to disconnect groups that won't mix well. This has already happened with Lemmy. Both extreme right wing (Nazi) and left wing (communist) groups have been de-federated. They are allowed to continue happily, just away from the bulk of users. The fragmented nature also allows for server cost, and workloads to be distributed.
Additionally, Lemmy wasn't quite ready for the mainstream when Reddit decided to sh#t the bed. I've watched it improve impressively, over the last few weeks though. Once it streamlines, it should hopefully provide all of us our fix.
- What are some of the far left groups?
just ignore the fed aspect? it doesn't really impact user experience at all.
- Good point but the community I like may be on another instance which would prevent similar community to grown elsewhere. If I get invested in it I run the risk of losing access to it.
Kbin.social. it's part of the system with a much better UI. I could sign in right away and there's very little unfederated
- I want to like kbin.social but the mobile website's UI isn't there yet. It's unintuitive and frustrating at times, I can't find logout button for instance.

So I'm still learning all of this too, but my understanding is this:
Your accounts on each instance get you access to whatever that instance is federated with. My mind goes to bundling, almost -- e.g., if you have a Hulu subscription, you can access Showtime through it as well.
When the instances defederate, it's like losing part of a bundle. Nothing stops you from making an account on that instance, though, while retaining your accounts on other instances.
So, in how it plays out: I have my account on reddthat.com. When I scroll through my feed, I get content from communities hosted on reddthat and from communities hosted on instances that are federated with reddthat.
But suppose I want to see content from communities on instances that aren't federated. All I have to do is switch over to another account on an instance that is federated or to an account on that instance specifically. I still have both of my accounts and all I need to do is switch.
The talk about shadowbanning just means that if you're trying to access content from an account not in federation, you won't be able to comment or anything like that.
Again, I'm still learning all of this stuff, so this may not be right and I welcome any and all corrections of anything I've said that isn't accurate.
- That's how I understand it too, but I just cannot wrap my head around why this would be a good idea. Why would anyone want having to have 5 different accounts just to browse all the communities they are interested in?
The Beehaw instance has defederated from the Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. Each instance is responsible for sending updates to other instances. Defederation means that no outgoing updates are sent and no incoming updates are honored.

Can there atleast be a way to let users outside of beehaw see posts and comments but not participate, rather than completely detaching and leaving a void of content?

Is there any reason for them defederating?

Lemmy got a large influx of new people (you probably noticed that), and those new people weren't reading their gidelines (that are more strict than usual) before posting there.
If you decide to make an account there, make sure to read their guidelines first.
It's nominally a personnel/time issue. It's easier to defederate with rapidly growing instances than try and keep tabs on the flood of posts which are coming in from them. Lemmy.World, at least for a time, was still federated with some shitstances, also out of manpower limitations, and beehaw decided to just take their ball and leave. It's the way federation works and is entirely up to them, just as reddit raising api costs and kicking moderators is within their rights. Your server, your rules. We can argue whether it's the best way to manage and build a small platform, but its the state of things at the moment.
disc: I'm a member of lemmy.world, as well as a smaller lemmy instance and kbin, both of which are still federated with beehaw.

If people want to troll them they will just join another open signup federated instance. I can see them just defederating with everyone that has open signups.

what about blahaj one

Is there a gaming community? I found one on Beehaw, but don’t know if it will work fully

If someone from lemmy.world posts to a BeeHaw community right now, I know BeeHaw users won't be able to see the post, but what about other lemmy.world users? What about users from kbin.social or any other instance? If people from other instances can still see the comments that seems like you could still have a conversation, just with a group of people that can't see it. Not sure how it works though, so curious if anyone here knows for sure.

If you're from Lemmy.World and post in a Beehaw.org community then Lemmy.World users will still see your post. But no other instance will. This is because all other instances look to Beehaw to get Beehaw posts. And without Beehaw federation your post never makes it to Beehaw and therefore it never reaches/gets relayed to other instances.
My understanding is that other users on the same home instance would still be able to see each other's content.
I assume someone from a third community federated with both sh.itjust.works and beehaw would see a disjointed conversation that includes both beehaw and sh.itjust.works replies. I do agree that it's still valuable to subscribe as those conversations are still valuable and they will probably refederate in the future.

Well this didn't take long to start spiraling