In short, they were having trouble maintaining their moderation standards. In an incredibly short-sighted move, they’ve split the lemmyverse… offloading the costs of their moderation choices to the rest of us who now have to deal with incredibly confusing asymmetrical replication.
They’ve called this move temporary, but there’s no schedule for restoring federation and no set list of criteria for what will enable that to happen. I would say it’s more “open-ended” in that they haven’t committed to defederating forever, but there’s no useful limit on the duration of the defederation either.
This sounds incredibly dumb. The nice thing about the feddyverse is that you can receive content from other servers and comment on it imho. Very disappointing.
Wel, they explain that in this case, it wasn’t all that nice to receive content from other servers, because it was a lot of work to moderate posts of users from two instances with no sign up requirements.
They also said they couldnt wait on moderation tools being developed. They’ll refederate once the storm dies down I strongly believe.
To describe this as defederating from “two instances” really undersells the impact. Those two instances represent 40% of the active userbase of the top ten instances in the lemmyverse in the last month, or well more than 30% of the entire active lemmyverse. When you add beehaw’s active user count into the mix, over 50% of the lemmyverse has been cut off from each other. This is an absolutely massive disruption to the federated network that will impact everyone for months to come… and has already created far far more moderation and support work than it has saved. See https://the-federation.info/platform/73 for user stats.
Personally, while i think it’s not the best solution…they don’t owe us an audience or a megaphone. If they owe anyone anything, it’s their own users. If they’re overwhelmed, and i totally believe that they are, they should do what they have to in order to deal with it
This view is technically correct, but I think very narrow because it takes no account of the external costs to the rest of the fediverse. Admins of major instances that host a double-digit percentage of the lemmyverse userbase SHOULD be expected to conduct themselves in a way that promotes the overall health of the ecosystem in addition to the health of their local instance. Jumping straight to defederating other major instances imposes massive costs for folks outside Beehaw, as described in my comment further down this thread.
There is an aphorism often deployed against free-speech absolutists, and I think paraphrasing it is applicable here… They have the right to use defederation carelessly and to the detriment of the rest of the fediverse if they choose to, but they don’t have the right to be free of the consequences of doing so. If the rest of the fediverse abandons Beehaw communities as risky and poorly moderated (and cutting off more than 30% of the active fediverse without cause IS poor moderation), that’s a reasonable consequence. If admins of other instances decide they don’t want to deal with this nonsense and band together to permanently defederate Beehaw from the majority of the lemmyverse, that’s also a reasonable consequence. No one else owes them a megaphone either, though so far other admins have shown more care for the health of the lemmyverse than the Beehaw admins have and have left the door open for them to rejoin the lemmyverse on normal terms, in spite of the high cost in confusion and user-unfriendlyness to everyone outside of Beehaw in the interim.
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksusers: https://lemmy.world/post/149743.In short, they were having trouble maintaining their moderation standards. In an incredibly short-sighted move, they’ve split the lemmyverse… offloading the costs of their moderation choices to the rest of us who now have to deal with incredibly confusing asymmetrical replication.
They’ve called this move temporary, but there’s no schedule for restoring federation and no set list of criteria for what will enable that to happen. I would say it’s more “open-ended” in that they haven’t committed to defederating forever, but there’s no useful limit on the duration of the defederation either.
This sounds incredibly dumb. The nice thing about the feddyverse is that you can receive content from other servers and comment on it imho. Very disappointing.
Wel, they explain that in this case, it wasn’t all that nice to receive content from other servers, because it was a lot of work to moderate posts of users from two instances with no sign up requirements. They also said they couldnt wait on moderation tools being developed. They’ll refederate once the storm dies down I strongly believe.
To describe this as defederating from “two instances” really undersells the impact. Those two instances represent 40% of the active userbase of the top ten instances in the lemmyverse in the last month, or well more than 30% of the entire active lemmyverse. When you add beehaw’s active user count into the mix, over 50% of the lemmyverse has been cut off from each other. This is an absolutely massive disruption to the federated network that will impact everyone for months to come… and has already created far far more moderation and support work than it has saved. See https://the-federation.info/platform/73 for user stats.
Personally, while i think it’s not the best solution…they don’t owe us an audience or a megaphone. If they owe anyone anything, it’s their own users. If they’re overwhelmed, and i totally believe that they are, they should do what they have to in order to deal with it
This view is technically correct, but I think very narrow because it takes no account of the external costs to the rest of the fediverse. Admins of major instances that host a double-digit percentage of the lemmyverse userbase SHOULD be expected to conduct themselves in a way that promotes the overall health of the ecosystem in addition to the health of their local instance. Jumping straight to defederating other major instances imposes massive costs for folks outside Beehaw, as described in my comment further down this thread.
There is an aphorism often deployed against free-speech absolutists, and I think paraphrasing it is applicable here… They have the right to use defederation carelessly and to the detriment of the rest of the fediverse if they choose to, but they don’t have the right to be free of the consequences of doing so. If the rest of the fediverse abandons Beehaw communities as risky and poorly moderated (and cutting off more than 30% of the active fediverse without cause IS poor moderation), that’s a reasonable consequence. If admins of other instances decide they don’t want to deal with this nonsense and band together to permanently defederate Beehaw from the majority of the lemmyverse, that’s also a reasonable consequence. No one else owes them a megaphone either, though so far other admins have shown more care for the health of the lemmyverse than the Beehaw admins have and have left the door open for them to rejoin the lemmyverse on normal terms, in spite of the high cost in confusion and user-unfriendlyness to everyone outside of Beehaw in the interim.