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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

I reckon this will hurt Lemmy in the long run

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.

Why?

@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.

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

Is there any reason for them defederating?

laughs in tiny instance