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Thinking about the direction of Beehaw (beehaw.org)
submitted 8 months ago by admin@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org
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Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.

I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.

Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.

Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.

Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?

This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.

The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.

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[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 5 points 8 months ago

@admin does Lemmy have any opt-in federation system? Like, only allow certain remote servers to connect? Maybe that would be a viable alternative

[-] sarmale@lemmy.zip 5 points 8 months ago

I think yes, an allowlist

[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 6 points 8 months ago

@sarmale exactly. I saw on r/RedditAlternatives that someone created a Lemmy instance that was defederated from everyone - so it is possible to turn your Lemmy server into a walled garden. Maybe an allowlist would make for a better middle ground.

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 8 points 8 months ago

We simply need a lot more moderation tools than the current set of lemmy devs are willing to create, and many of them see some of the requests as frivolous or not in line with their personal beliefs on how the website mechanics should work. There's also a metric ton of bugs, potential legal issues with how the platform deals with federation and malicious and abhorrent material, and the issue of the code of choice this website runs on not being a particularly popular or easy to pick up coding language meaning less access to talent to fix or work on new things. We've been talking about potentially moving platforms for some time now and with time there are just more discoveries of new issues.

[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 4 points 8 months ago

@Gaywallet I see. What about the other federated choices? Like Kbin or Mbin, even Discourse?

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 5 points 8 months ago

These are among the platforms we are testing

[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 4 points 8 months ago

@Gaywallet That's great to hear! 😁

[-] derbis@beehaw.org 3 points 8 months ago

What in particular? Maybe these could be addressed as a fork. I would be willing to contribute to the extent I can

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I will be honest with you, I do not think that it would be a good use of your time. This has been unfolding for a long time and its clear that there are both coding and ideological issues with lemmy as a platform (there's plenty of discussions of this which have unfolded in the chat and beehaw support communities which I would suggest reading up on). However, if you are committed to making lemmy as a whole a better place, here's a truncated list of some of the still existing issues:

  • There are not enough federation options to deal effectively with current problems, at minimum:
    1. One-way federation to protect our site culture
    2. Exemption from all feed & media reject to handle pornography
  • Purging posts and comments does not purge associated images
  • Reports are not sent to the right places (example: we don't get reports about our users' off-instance activity and reports are not sent to moderators which are off-instance)
  • The modlog does not work in a chronological fashion and does not allow to filter actions by instance or per community
  • Moderators are exposed to graphic images because a banned user's description is still visible
  • If you are a mod of a community, and you get banned from that community you mod, you can still take mod actions
  • If you get site-banned from an instance and you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from your instance can see and interact with your posts
[-] derbis@beehaw.org 3 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the thorough answer. I'll have to do some thinking.

Where are these discussions happening? I haven't seen much on the Lemmy instance itself until like yesterday.

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 5 points 8 months ago

They've happened here in the open in the communities mentioned but also extensively on our discord and matrix

this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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