this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Their reasons are much more selfish than that. They insist on only having 4 moderators while never scaling up, and they don't like how federation allows users from other instances to post on their instance because it disrupts their rigid ideal community vibe. According to their suggestions on "improving moderation tooling", the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances' users can't post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work. The moderation work of other instance admins for their users doesn't matter, clearly.
Every interaction I've had with Beehaw so far has reminded me of overlord Reddit mods that think they are god.
Isn't this like... the whole point of the Federated Universe? The mods do Beehaw want their server to be a "safe space". They're perfectly within their rights to restrict who can post in their own community. But you, the user, are not in any way beholden to their whims, and can make an account on any other Lemmy instance, or create your own and make it as restricted or unrestricted as you please.
It seems logical to me that the creators of a safe space for marginalized communities would restrict their community from the internet at large because people on the Internet feel emboldened by anonymity to attack others.
Yes, the point of the Fediverse is that everyone is free to associate with groups they choose. There is nothing wrong with creating instances that are very isolated. What Beehaw wants with the "improving moderation tooling", however, is a safe space where the network is restricted from them, but they still have full access to the rest of the network. That suggestion is what I was calling selfish, because this way their users would be parasiting off the content and moderation of other instances while giving nothing back.
I still don't see how this is not in line with the ideals and values of the Fediverse. If other instances don't want to take on the extra moderation you are referring to, they can simplify defederate from Beehaw, too.
Every instance can do whatever it wants, and if other instances don't like that then they can both go their own ways.
I don't like the idea of one way defederation, that seems like it would open the door for larger instances to try to shut down smaller ones.
I wouldn't call it selfish. They want tools for more granular control on their instance. That's perfectly fine. If they limit who can post or comment based on the instance they are from. The other instances are perfectly free to limit their users as well in response or for their own arbitrary reasons.
There seems to be a distinct lack of controls across lemmy as a whole. The only option for them is all or nothing at the moment.
I think the big take away is for users to think about what instance they create their accounts and communities on.
Ya I think a big part of the pushback is that I think a lot of people chose their "home" instance based on the guidance provided by the instance admins and then lost access to a lot of the network because of other decisions made by those same admins
Thank you, you put in words my thoughts exactly. Not all communities need to have the same rules as the others, not all need to be as open as others and that is more than fine.
Homogenization of the internet led us to a handful of corporations dominating social media websites and that is awful.
Exactly. Instead of being a reddit user and admins ban a bunch of subs that can no longer be accessed at all, you can still access those instances with another account.
Reddit can in the future ban NSFW content and there is nothing you can do to view those subreddits ever again.
Not the case here.
I read their post explaining the decision, but it seems like it is at odds with itself. If your goal is to create a safe space, why are you using a federated service? I understand you have the option to defederate, but at that point why didn't you just setup a standalone message board. It just feels that their use case doesn't fit the system.
The community vibe is definitely a huge motivation. They want to be able to control the sort of people on their instance which they can't do if the mass user bases from lemmy.world etc. that are (relatively) neutral have access. It's a shame because they had some good communities established.
Yeah, I don't believe for one second that those 4 admins have actually, meaningfully, personally vetted 11,000+ users. People have posted (sorry, I dont have the link) here that they just filled the "application" out with nonsense and still got approved.
Doesn't surprise me too much tbh. I don't think I'd make an account with Beehaw but I might end up making one with a small instance they federate with to have access. While they have a right to defederate it's not something I like seeing.
So, if they are struggling the moderate a community with 11,000+ users, it would make sense for them to limit an even large number of external users for the time being until they feel they have things better in control, correct?
That's not what I'm commenting on, but yeah, naturally. It's their instance, they can do what they want.
@Andreas @sebovzeoueb They new going into this that they would be federated. They waited to get enough people then do stuff like this. People will leave then as there content will get old fast. They will realize like reddit that people want to be able to search and find new content
So basically they want to have their cake and eat it too. How lovely.
Yep, it sounds exactly like a reddit mod power trip
Is that right? That seems not in keeping with the spirit of the thing. If they don't want to moderate large communities, how about you don't host large communities at all. Maybe that's what they're after, but they had seeded the space with a lot of logical communities that people were going to click on from the "find federated communities" pages from around the fverse.
It seems like they really just want the well made, actively developed message boards software, but they dont truly want the federation stuff. They wanted (and got) the user boost from all the reddit nonsense (and no, I do not believe that four people personally, meaningfully vetted thousands of users in the course of a couple days) and now they want to wall themselves off.
They have 30 something mods, they are 4 admins.
It's not about being selfish, it's about creating a space that they think can be a safe space. That's what's cool about federation, you just use other instances and that's it.
It seems to me that beehaw could already accomplish something along these lines with an "automod" equivalent that just insta-rejects any outsider posts on their hosted communities. So having that built into the protocol as a flag of some sort may actually be a good idea, because then other instances would be able to more easily see that behaviour and choose to not federate with them in return. If I was running a Lemmy or Kbin instance I wouldn't want to bother my users with communities that they could see but not interact with.