Gotta say this being one of my first impressions of lemmy… Its not great. Beehaw had a large tech and gaming section that I literally only just subbed too.
Welcome to human nature.
It’s easy to look at Reddit or any other communities and pin the blame all the bad things on mods, admins, or whoever in charge. However, the truth is, anyone who gets in any position of power will make decisions that may not benefit the larger whole or reflect the community at large. Lemmy will deal with this, just as Reddit dealt with it (and succeeded in spite of it).
Yea I mean I get it. It just sucks that this is the first real experience I am having with this system. Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this. I suppose this should be expected. Lemmy is likely experiencing some extreme growing pains unlike anything it has seen before.
I totally understand that while this is an annoyance at the end of the day this is likely still a more desirable outcome then what is happening with Reddit. At least here that set of admins can only do so much damage to the overall system while the Reddit admins have total control over the whole system.
This seems to be new frontier for a lot of users. Lemmy is like Reddit in a lot of ways but so much different in so many more ways. As new users, we’re pretty much guinea pigs (or lemmings, I guess) and I imagine there’s going to be a lot of this in the weeks to come.
Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this
This is experience! If Lemmy works out, we’ll be able to say we helped pave the way!
Yes, if my instance unfederated with beehaw I’d have to find a new instance, those two !communities are too large a portion of the current fediverse activity.
This is bad for fediverse adoption, even if there is merit to the behavioural issues.
It would be good if Lemmy server tools allowed admins to remove an instance from their front-page without stopping user access.
Hmm.
Consider that Beehaw is more comparable to a major subreddit already. Lets say /r/wsb was having issues with new trolling users and they decide to go private for a week to preserve their culture (and have done in the past before).
Now instead of “just” one subreddit making that decision, the entire alignment of Beehaw (including all their communities) made a decision in one fell swoop.
No matter how you look at it, this is better for the Beehaw community already than what we’ve had in Reddit. And yeah, it sucks for us here in lemmy.world to not talk with Beehaw and for those users to not talk with us for now, but like /r/wsb, there’s no reason why this has to be a permanent defederation. They can refederate after this “Reddit Boom” and when traffic slows down maybe a week or two from now and their moderators/admins can keep up with the new influx of users.
From the perspective of “What Lemmy-software needs to do”, perhaps a “super-moderator”, below Admin but above moderator who has access to user-bans and/or user-vetting is what’s needed for this community. That way, Beehaw and Lemmy.world can re-federate, Beehaw can appoint community leaders who can perform user-vetting (Gmail-like invitations), but Beehaw admins remain the admins. And they get to have tight control over poorly-behaving users from other instances (ie: blocking them out entirely until they’re vetted or invited in).
Isn’t that a bit entitled? Reddit was a company who made money with their users, but Lemmy isn’t run by a company, it’s run by volunteers. Running a small server is one thing, but who is going to moderate content from 100’000s of users, content generated by an instance that doesn’t even have any basic restrictions on it’s userbase? What if a large group of people start spamming illegal shit? What if there is suddenly cp showing up on your server instance? Who is going to deal with that, what are the legal implications for that?
One might assume they quit their server, but they didn’t… They just temporarily disabled federation because they feel that they don’t have the capabilities to moderate that many users… You can still apply for a local account on their instance, you can still browse their content without an account…
EDIT: You can even still browse content from beehawk and comment on it, but comments made from lemmy.world will not be visible by beehawk.
Excuse me? I support the beehawk admin’s decisions, it’s a very sensible decision that I suspect other instances will have to seriously consider soon as well because moderation will be an important issue very soon.
My point is that the commenter I replied to and many users who are complaining about this decision, about how “it splits the community in two” and about how “this is classic reddit behaviour” are acting a bit entitled as they don’t seem to be aware of the immense problems that come with moderation, especially when you do it as a hobby…
Seems like beehaw is doing everything they can to isolate themselves from the community. They seem to have good intentions but they are way too uptight.
Less than an hour ago, I was reporting some pretty vile shit that was being spammed on some of their places I was subscribed to. It was a lot, all at the exact same time. If they are getting coordinated attacks like that regularly, I’m not sure I can really blame them for wanting to wait for the tools they need to keep it in check.
I saw the same thing, lots of slurs being thrown around. I blocked the individual users. I’m not on either instance so I can still see both
The stuff I saw was worse than just slurs. One was a meme about murdering drag performers. Really hateful shit.
Beehaw has good intentions, but I don’t know if those intentions are entirely compatible with the fundamental architecture of Lemmy.
They literally are because being able to defederate is part of the fundamental architecture of fediverse apps. And defederating from instances that are putting the kind of content into your community that you don’t want is… like, that ability is one of the core selling points of fediverse apps.
Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.
It wasn’t a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn’t maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that’s fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they’d like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they’re going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.
they are way too uptight.
I don’t get why people have such a hard time seeing how hard effective moderation of 100’000s of people is… The people running lemmy aren’t companies or businesses, they are hobbyists… They do all the administration and moderation in their spare time… Taking care of the server cost is one thing, but moderation is no joke… Especially when the tools provided are also build by hobbyists who have been building this in their spare time as well…
And it’s better to act when you notice that you cannot effectively moderate when things are relatively harmless… Because what happens when trolls notice that they cannot moderate effectively and actually post harmful content, like threats, cp, etc?
This is still a new system. There’s gonna be some fuss. Expect for not everything to go perfectly all the time.
This is computers. Sometimes it’s just necessary to turn something off, wait a bit, and turn it on again.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25114
Called this becoming an issue on my first day here. Beehaw seems like a very sensitive group of people. Which is fine but just means we need to restart some of the popular communities they had on more open-minded servers.
I feel that I should also mention that I understand and respect the rationale given by the beehaw admins for defederation. I think they made the correct decision for their community. Just kinda sucks for us.
Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.
Awesome. Love to see new instances with a wholesome theme. General purpose servers are nice, but I’m really excited for the possibilities of servers with better defined userbases built around certain locations, interests, or ideologies. That would really unlock the possibilities of federation
That’s pretty big. I wasn’t a huge fan of everything they were doing, though. From all the communities I saw from Beehaw, they were all generic, cookie cutter ones that seemed to be trying to fill the default subs from Reddit. Gaming, Politics, Space, etc. All simple ones with the same icons and everything. I assume they were all ran by the same group of people, which loses the community feel I appreciate about most other instances.
I assume they were all ran by the same group of people
Yup, that’s correct. Beehaw’s 4 admins run every communty on there
The thing that makes this notable is that those beehaw communities were the largest and therefore defacto defaults.
Yeah, I do appreciate what they were trying, but making communities with the purpose of being popular default ones and then giving up as soon as the site starts to grow is not great.