FediLore + Fedidrama

I've read the post: my take on it is that there's not enough moderation tools, and the only one that really works against servers with open registration is defederation.

I think the mods have expressed that this was more of a decision driven by the lack of efficient modding tools as of the moment. Of course, also taking into consideration that they really do want to stay true to their ethos in the first place. I personally feel better interacting within Beehaw because the community is headed in a healthier direction as opposed to just being another reddit dupe/reddit refugee camp

From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can't see this being a good decision for Bee's long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn't enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there's nothing to scroll people won't stay. The only reason I'm here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.

I just signed up a new account after having started with Beehaw. I joined them because they were growing and seemed to have a good attitude about the whole thing.

This is pretty sad to see as, like you, I think this is going to hurt them in the long run. I could be wrong though. This whole thing is new territory.

Does this mean that I need to run my own Lemmy to federate from all the sources I'm interested in, if I want content from beehaw and lemmy.world and a.n.other.example.org if they are not federated together?

If I do create my own, do I have to persuade those servers to accept my federation?

So much I don't understand. Wait... I think I get it: if lemmy.ca federates with all these places, I see it all and can interact with it? Are the federated/defederated lists openly available somewhere?

I initially registered there, thinking it would be a more moderate instance compared to Lemmy and their controversial admins. Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval. Ended up on kbin since then. This will be worse for beehaw than Lemmy or other instances that stay federated, because now users there have to really think if that's truly what they were looking for, especially if they came from Reddit.

Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.

Does anyone know if the admins at Beehaw tried discussing the problem with their counterparts at the other instances? (I'd search the comments to that post for an answer, but I don't think there's a good way to do that yet.)

One more reason to start a personal instance I suppose.

Update: I received this answer from the Beehaw admin.

About open registration: we had a debate about that too, but actually decided closed registration didn't make that much sense because anyone can just go register on another instance and participate in our communities, so what was the point of gatekeeping registrations?

And ultimately that's a very broad problem with the fediverse. Yes, you can curate your own local community all you want, but if you accept content and comments from the other parts of the fediverse, it's actually a bigger moderation problem than something centralized. And there's a liability problem: even if you police your own communities well, someone could subscribe to something unsavory across the web and you're technically "hosting" it.

Federation isn't easy to get right. Ultimately it makes moderation less scalable, not more, because every little instance has to moderate the whole fediverse.

I know this is an unpopular move for many Fediverse users including Beehaw. I support this move by the Beehaw admins because they are overworked enough managing the site, they don't have the energy to be constantly chasing trolls spamming accounts posting harmful posts and messages onto their community.

They have a stated ethos, and they should do whatever necessary to be able to keep up with the growing user base. Of course it will stunt their growth but between pursuing growth and keeping the vibe on that instance, they choose the vibe and I respect that decision.

It's interesting to me how this will play out. Personally I think it will hurt beehaw more than the other instances. The issue today on Lemmy is that communities are too small. I'm trying to kickstart a few and I imagine any community that is on beehaw today will now have a split community on one of the two unfederated instances.

imo it's one of those tough situations that comes with the mix of federated instances and this style of forums. Mastodon had similar issues back in the day, with some instances defederating from .social, but usually not quite as high profile as this, and most users felt less of an effect. for me, Beehaw's more walled garden lead me to choose another instance, and I pretty quickly decided to create a couple accounts on different instances to prepare for these issues

more than anything, l hope moderation tools improve to the extent that these issues can be avoided more

This is going to happen a lot, I think, while things shake out. If Beehaw don't trust Lemmy.world to ban toxic users, then defederating makes some sense. I think it's probably self-harming, though, because it'll lead to communities like Technology being replicated on other instances, and those are the big Beehaw draw.

You can always have multiple accounts on multiple instances. A pr0n alt was common on Reddit, and is the only way to get at adult material here. Maybe in the fediverse it'll become common to have a safety alt, and a spicy alt too.