Beehaw.org, a large powerful Lemmy server, has defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works in response to a severe harassment campaign involving porn-spam and death threats.
This means beehaw.org users and communities are now cut off from Lemmy.world and vice versa.
The full details are a bit hard to follow, but the TL;DR: Beehaw.org wants a curated community and Lemmy.world doesn’t. Beehaw.org has a tougher sign up process while it’s basically free at Lemmy.world.
But that’s not a big deal or the real drama. People are all looking into the future. /R/piracy has moved into the Fediverse, as have pornographic servers. So now there are discussions on all sorts of topics and what should be or shouldn’t be federated.
That’s fine. The federization model works, but differently than what Redditors are used to. So I think people are confused about how things play out on the Lemmy-community.
undefined>Beehaw.org wants a curated community and Lemmy.world doesn’t. Beehaw.org has a tougher sign up process while it’s basically free at Lemmy.world.
To be fair beehaw seems very different from the joyous anarchic freedom we enjoy here (I’ve been on Lemmy for a week and feel more at home than I ever was on Reddit). No right to create new communities, registration needs approval…
maybe they’ll come back to the federation, maybe they’ll be their own thing. I hope for the former because there is some great content there too.
I’ve been part of super-tight, highly curated communities before. They’re nice in their own way and a fully different way of running a community than Reddit-style that most are used to.
I think for a lot of (former) Redditors, they come over here on Lemmy.world and see a tightly curated community like Beehaw.org and just get confused. Something like that was simply not possible in Reddit and runs counter to the way popular internet sites (not just Reddit, but Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc.) were run. But this is closer to the BBS days where recruitment was a phone-call and a secret code you found at the gym… back in those days, all communities were tightly curated and Reddit is the aberration.
In any case, Lemmy (and the Fediverse) allows the “freedom” group to interact with the “tight / curation” world, in a… tight controlled manner. Its alien, its unnatural to some, etc. etc. But hey, its Lemmy. That’s how we’re gonna roll.
Note that user@programming.dev still can access everything. So yeah, everything is working as expected, much to the surprise of the former Redditors who dont understand federation yet.
To be fair: this is a deeply philosophical issue of open vs closed, federated vs centralized, etc etc that people are touching upon. But this is Lemmy, over there is Reddit. Things will be different, especially how moderators and administrators act.
To add more context, currently Lemmy doesn’t offer great moderation tools. So if a relatively open instance like lemmy.world interacts with beehaw, beehaw ability to shut down the ‘few bad apples’ coming from lemmy.world is rudimentary at best.
At a certain point, admins just can’t keep up and have to make a judgment call. Either accept that trolls and bad actors are going to get through or cut off the source of the infection, regardless of whether or not that impacts regular users.
Beehaw has already stated that they’re open to reconnecting once they have a better way of moderating and dealing with bad actors.
If they are getting flooded by users of another instance who simply want to troll and they don’t have an effective way of then it’s hard to blame them for taking the action that they did.
The comments I’ve read were mostly about Beehaw users clicking on “All” on the main page and then getting upset that they see content they don’t like.
It’s pretty easy to sum up. The admins on beehaw decided to break federation with a couple of other instances including lemmy.world. Their reasoning being that the open registration policies and relative lack of oversight in those instances were incompatible with the space they wanted to create on beehaw. What this means is that users from lemmy.world cannot interact with users on beehaw and vice versa.
The technical details of how all this works are a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic gist.
As a lemmy.world user, will I still be able to lurk beehaw communities? Or will they not be updated on my instance? In other words, is defederation directional or static?
In a way, but the details are complicated enough that I’m a little fuzzy on how it all plays out myself. As I understand it though lemmy.world users would be looking at the version of the beehaw community that is stored on lemmy.world. They can view and even interact with posts and communities as if nothing had changed. However, any content they generate would not leave lemmy.world. Additionally there are details regarding how certain communities start being hosted that I am unsure of.
the short of it is beehaw is a selective community that is fairly liberal and expect people to be respectful to each other. That is the alien concept of a lot of reddit refugees and hence beehaw has to leave the larger federation of lemmy/fediverse and that means you won’t be able to see their topics here (say lemmy.world). A lot of people seem to be mad that they’re doing it and saying angry things about it. There is a possibility when they get better mod tools they can return, but for now there is simply not enough mods to control the refugee trolls.
