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.
Yeah, no problem with a super tight community on a forum. I’m part of places like that, they’re great, we really know each other, some of the people I met there are now some of my closest friends.
I just feel that for place(s) like here, everyone should have the right to choose what content they want (or not) to see in this fast growing network.
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.
