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.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your “responsibility for the betterment of the Fediverse” conclusion.
So Beehaw has been chugging along for a couple years, carefully curating their communities and their membership. What they did works really well, and the flood of new people from other instances were drawn to it.
I don’t think it’s Beehaw’s responsibility to change because so many new people like to use Beehaw’s communities. Beehaw is not the Fediverse, nor is it Beehaw’s responsibility to foster the growth of the Fediverse. Beehaw is responsible for Beehaw, and only for Beehaw.
If people like what Beehaw has built over the last couple years, they should model their baby instances on Beehaw’s experienced one.
The overwhelming amount of content is distributed among lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and beehaw.org - whether these instances like it or not.
Is the expectation that every popular instance has its communities for general-purpose stuff?
Do we need a [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc? That fragmentation seems like a nightmare for the average user and for adoption in general.
Yes. That’s decentralization. We are a village of cottages, hanging out on each others’ front porches to chat. My neighbor has a really nice rocking chair on their porch that people like to sit in, does that mean I can’t have a rocking chair on my porch? Maybe the folks in the other cottages don’t hang out in my rocking chair much, but if my family living in my cottage want to use my rocking chair on my porch, why should I have to throw it away just because someone else has a more popular one?