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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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They literally are because being able to defederate is part of the fundamental architecture of fediverse apps. And defederating from instances that are putting the kind of content into your community that you don't want is... like, that ability is one of the core selling points of fediverse apps.
Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.
It wasn't a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn't maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that's fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they'd like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they're going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.
From a purely operational standpoint, rapid growth stresses a network service not only in its technical capacity, but also in the ability of the service's operators to keep up with fighting fires. Engineering capacity to work on a service is itself a limiting factor on healthy growth.
If the tools aren't yet there to mitigate a rapid growth in abuse problems, then it just makes sense for them to limit their exposure to the rapid-growth part of the network. It takes time to write those tools.
The main issue with an instance such as lemmy.world is that they don't vet people at all. Beehawk manually approves their users, but that becomes kinda pointless when anyone can just create an account on lemmy.world and then go post on beehawk.
Yeah, but then is Beehaw just going to defederate with every instance that has open registration or limited vetting, past a certain user threshold?
That includes lots of instances. Kbin.social has open registration and is growing, for example.
At that point, is a federated social network really what served their goals?
Writing a paragraph about why you want to join isnβt necessarily a great vetting process though
But isn't that true of many more smaller instances as well? Will Beehaw defederate from everyone?
Most likely only if those small instances become hot beds for signing up for accounts to go cause problems
Sure, there are smaller instances that don't vet, but according to the beehawk admins, they aren't an issue in terms of moderation, probably because of their small size. If other instances were to cause an immense need for increased moderation, I'm sure they will defederate from them as well.
Also the admins made it clear that this is supposed to be a temporary action until they are able to effectively moderate their community according to their rules and goals.
I disagree with that assessment, and it doesn't match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.
It's true that in the future, they may have sufficient mod tools/capacity to overcome these philosophical differences with brute force. But at minimum, it is a union of both practical ability and philosophical differences that led to this decision and that is totally in line with the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I don't know if it was the right decision for them. Time will tell. But being able to make those decisions on their own judgment is crucial to the longterm health of the system. We're two outsiders to Beehaw. I can't speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didn't like the sound of a more curated safe space. I also chose not to register at Lemmy.world, because there are things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, too. That's a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.
What about lemmy.world rubbed you the wrong way?
Hard to say since it's totally subjective. I'm not in love with Lemmy as an ActivityPub service to start with. Devs have enough closet skeletons and the UX just seemed... not my style. Lemmy World, at least from the join list, had zero personality. It also expanded incredibly quickly, to the point that I truly am skeptical any kind of local moderation is going to be possible for a while. I have a feeling I am going to have to start filtering content from it myself -- my front page is being absolutely assblasted with porn, stupid memes, and low-effort posts all coming in from LW already.
Long term? Probably not a big deal. But in these early days, it is a turnoff. LW is a firehose right now, and the mod tools available are not yet up to that task.