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Is there any reason for them defederating?
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go "this fediverse thing is just too complicated!" and go to one of the centralized replacements.
"The growth" of the fediverse in general or of any platform in it is not responsibility of one server. The only thing Beehaw admins are responsible for is Beehaw.
If you want Lemmy to grow create your own communities and threads, participate in other people's communities and posts, etc.
there are more than 1000 Lemmy servers, many of whom are open to community creation (something that Beehaw never has been)
Go create content on Lemmy if you want it to grow.
BTW, "growth" is not necessarily a good thing on the fediverse. Growing too much can be the death of a server.
I don't mean to the growth of the fediverse is their responsibility, but I feel it is a problem that will affect them along with everyone else. Trolls are an existential threat to a safe space community, but lack of users is too.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren't struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation. If you actually read the announcement threads about the de-federation, Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren't members of that community, so who cares? If you're that unhappy make your own community (or cry) but don't pretend it's the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
And to the overall growth concerns, again - who cares? Lemmy doesn't have to be a 1:1 reddit replacement. I'd say many of us actually consider it's relatively low user count as a positive.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw's issue, I'd be more sympathetic, but it isn't. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
They have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety advice community reach.
That's the point! That's the whole point! There are no other tools built yet It IS an incredibly crude moderation tool, because the alternatives are being worked on as we speak
The most trolls came from those two instances since they have no criteria to joining and they have so many users, and beehaw prides itself on being a nice, safe space. Lemmy currently doesn't have the moderating tools to empower them to take care of all the new, toxic redditors, but they said they're willing to federate with them when it does, which I'm sure it will eventually.
I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.
A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.
Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.
Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!
Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!
To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don't have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
It's still those four people's server though, and it's totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren't entitled to it's content, and users don't have to stick around if they don't like the way it's being run.
The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there will be some servers whose choices you don't agree with.
I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.
The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.
Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.
If that were true, then the software wouldn't have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel. You could write software in a way where defederating from a specific instance is hard to do.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what "the point" of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
User experience is not the primary motivator for the development of the Fediverse. The features you dislike are the core features of the Fediverse and are the main reasons it exists.
Software exist to solve a user's problem. All software's primary motivator should be user experience.
It's quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user's don't want to use (see: Reddit's official app / new site).
Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.
Progress? Either that or their site got overloaded.
It's working for me, but quoted below: