I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don't need to defederate from each other.

With that said, I think it's a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.

I also wasn't aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?

This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don't worry about which instance you're on are bought into the promise that federation can "just work" like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you're going to have to make harder decisions about instances.

It's pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It's unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.

Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn't them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.

Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it's important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn't arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)

In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they'll probably tell you this is good.)

This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you're building communities hosted on a particular instance and there's not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?

Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)

Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.

The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who's not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly...ish. But that's hard both because "sufficiently rigorous" is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn't grow on trees.

I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.

Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.

I had hopes for it but I guess I'm one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.

I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.

Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂

I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.

I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.

beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and "high quality" community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.

I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.

I think it's also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

Read access should be managed on the user level, not the instance level imo. I don't want to inherit some collective blacklist, I want my own.

For write access, it's more complicated and I'm not sure what to think.

eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a "safe space" anywhere except between your ears.

really just reads like excuses to being lazy.

I'm just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied...in a straight text based communication medium....?

That's a problem waiting to happen.

If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn't say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.

I don't know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.

I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could've anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.

liked beehaw but didn't join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.

Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.

It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.

I think it's totally fine for instances that want to be small and community-focused to not be federated with the greater pool of the internet. Especially when, as they've said, the moderation manpower and tooling isn't there to handle the extra users.

Personally, I wouldn't want to join a place like that (I've never been a fan of message boards or other niche communities), but it's their place and their rules.

I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this... This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.

Can someone ELI5 what happens when another instance defederate us? None of those are my main instance, so nothing has changed on my end with them...

Ironically enough I had just added several communities from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to my feed on Beehaw. Luckily I can still see them on my "Subscribed" list - not the content, the community names - so I'm adding them to my kbin subscriptions instead.

I'm glad to see that kbin has gotten stable. I'd been trying to use it for days, but it kept freezing and crashing!