hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.
we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".
that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.
[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
btw guys, there's no intent of defederating from kbin, right? We're good, right? I don't want to lose you, lol. You're really cool, it seems to me.
I think us kbinauts are fine for now
Kbinauts is such an awesome name haha
Kbin (platform, important distinction) will likely have some problematic instances which are defederated, but it will also have many many instances which are fine. And the good kbin instances will likely defederate the problematic ones as well. This is the nature of platforms using open source software and federation.
Also, the reddit fiasco has dumped a lot of pressure on both lemmy and kbin before the software is sufficiently developed to cope with it. These two instances which Beehaw has (temporarily) defed'ed from aren't problematic in and of themselves, but they've both been hit with large numbers of problematic accounts in the influx.
TL:DR Support your instance owner(s) regarding moderation :)