Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
Manual admin approval for every signup.
That does not seem sustainable.
It can be with a larger admin/mod team.
Maybe, but it doesn't do much to prevent trolls. Since registration is anonymous a human doesn't have any information on if they should approve the account or not approve the account. At most they have an IP address which is trivial to change.
It doesn't really affect me, I don't use their communities but it sucks for their users who are cut off from two of the fastest growing servers. By de-federating they're essentially unplugging from the rest of the Fediverse, which is the entire point of using ActivityPub in the first place. If they're not federating then they're not different than Reddit or any other single-server community.
I understand the worry about trolls and whatnot, but dealing with that is the moderation team's job in any community. No amount of registration restriction can prevent that outside of requiring a real government issued ID and manual identification checks.
It seems like a kneejerk reaction, I think it'll be damaging to their community in the long-term as users just swap instances in order to be able to interact with the greater community.
Why? What would you even check?
It's not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it's just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.
From what I understand, it's 'did this human read what we're about here and respond in a way that demonstrates they know what they're signing onto'?
At minimum, it weeds out folks who don't take the time to write a couple sentences, and kinda acts like a crappy lock on a door. If someone's determined to start some nonsense, it's not hard to get in and try. But a lot of folks will try the door once, see it doesn't open right away, and fuck off. They don't want growth for growth's sake, so the fact that this stifles growth to a degree isn't a concern.
But yeah, I agree it doesn't scale very well.