Now that we’re no longer linked to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works we can’t subscribe to their communities any more.
How affected were your subscriptions? How many of your subs stopped working?
My subs were mostly beehaw and lemmy.world so I’m looking for new stuff. :)
Do you have some tips for interesteing communities on other instances?
Honestly feel like this is more reason to join a smaller instance which can interact with all of these communities. It takes some of the load off of the bigger instances, you can have a closer relationship to the mods/admins of your instance, and have protection against drama that goes down between the bigger instance
We really just need a way to migrate accounts (with post histories, etc.) from one instance to another. I know it’s been a hotly requested topic; hopefully it gets added at some point.
I wonder how that would work if an instance gets abruptly shut down. Maybe each time you make an account you get a ‘recovery key’ that you can link to your new account on a new instance, thereby taking ownership of your old posts (or at least the ones that got federated out of your old instance).
It’s temporary, so I’m not very fussed. It’s all just part of being in a Fediverse. I deliberately did not create an alt/back-up account, despite most people doing so. (Too likely to spend even more time online!) There are plenty of other community subscriptions to keep me busy even with the current defed.
Just about everything on mander.xyz is interesting. That’s a science and nature instance you could look into.
That is a rather healthy outlook tbh!
I think I’m going to sub to some kbin magazines, that’ll add some extra stuff, they’re pretty big after all. :)
I ended up subscribing to magazines from kbin today, too. Still a lot to discover. lemmy.dbzer0.com has a lot of interesting stuff as well.
I must have missed a memo. Why did beehaw defederate with lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works?
I really want to like Lemmy, but if we can randomly lose access to content like that, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Details. Basically, there are four people running Beehaw and trying to moderate. Beehaw is not a Reddit replacement, nor is it a troll/free speech friendly place, by design. The intent is for Beehaw to be an open, but curated, instance. That’s why there is a sign up process.
Those two instances are both large and open sign up enabled, Lemmy today has extremely weak moderation tools compared to Reddit, there’s been a massive influx of traffic and Reddit users, and those two Instances are the place where many trolls are landing.
It’s temporary, but today the tools and infrastructure are not in place to maintain both open fed with these Instances and preserve the Beehaw identity.
I hear what you are saying. However, the Fediverse intentionally puts a lot of control into the hands of whoever is running the Instance. I, for one, do believe that the Beehaw Admins want Beehaw to be federated with as many Instances as possible. It’s very clear from their Rules and About posts though, that controlling and curating the atmosphere within this Instance is the #1 priority, and access to content for their own members is a high but secondary priority. They also did not want or ask to be such a huge destination for accounts in the Fediverse. One of the reasons I believe there are so many communities here is because Beehaw is an option for folks who want a safe and controlled platform with a broad range of topics, with discussion that fits a certain community culture that Beehaw espouses. Whether those communities are the largest or most active is not a motivating factor in their creation.
Beehaw admins seem to be placing the health of their own communities and members above the “greater good” of the Fediverse, which is precisely the kind of decision the Fediverse empowers them to make. They even said that, if necessary, they would move to a whitelist model for Federation. So no, the system will not “continue to be overwhelmed,” because the Admins have been very clear that they will take steps as drastic as necessary to maintain the community and culture they are attempting to build. That’s an entirely legitimate use for Fediverse Instances, even if it rubs many people (myself included) the wrong way.
For what it’s worth, I have another account on lemmy.dbzer0 and another much smaller Instance which have much more focused communities and open Federation, which embodies a more typical or expected Fediverse user experience. I plan to stick around Lemmy/KBin for the next year or so and watch all this play out. It’s still very early days and these things will work themselves out.
Thanks for the update and for the link to the reasoning – I had completely missed it.
Based on the initial post (only mentioning defederation without linking to the Details), it sounded like the three servers had a falling-out of some sort, but this sounds reasonable. I can appreciate the difficulty of trying to maintain a welcoming environment.
From a user perspective, I think I’m mostly frustrated with the lack of visibility with these changes, specifically trying to keep track of what I do and don’t have access to. I don’t think that’s the responsibility of beehaw to implement, but I might continue to look for solutions
While it’s not the easiest to sort through, the Instances list at the bottom of the page shows every instance we’re federated with and those that are blocked. This will always show what you do and don’t have access to through your Beehaw account (or through your account on another instance should you sign up elsewhere). Direct link if it’s easier: https://beehaw.org/instances
It’s unfortunate that Beehaw started so many communities with such generic names with so few admins. The “beauty” of federation/lemmey/kbin aka “Reddit style” is that communities are supposed to be self-organizing and have their own representation/moderation.
I think the bigger problem is Beehaw decided to launch so many generic names copying Reddit’s busiest and most generic reddits without thinking through the moderationand traffic overhead.
it should be instances have their champion topics and they’re federated or if they have the manpower/technology and funding they can go for the big generic names.
I get why things were defederated - but blaming open registrations is a cop-out (a big lie… you can’t know people by their registration info). It was bad "systems thinking’ that led to an overwhelmed system that will continue to be overwhelmed.
I’d love if there was a “meta subreddit” option here in the fediverse so I could group together every instance of say !cats and the eventual hundreds of variants on black cats, or orange cats, or illegally smol cats, into a single easy to view link. This way it would be easy to just and new groups of similar discussion into a single continuous channel. Perhaps this may be a thing once more of the apps start to take off and mature, but until then it’s definitely a thing I’m missing here.
Run your own instance and it becomes irrelevant.
Honestly, I wish this wasn’t necessary. This is the worst thing about federation, in my opinion - inter-instance politics results in one instance admin defederating from another and all of the users of that instance, who may have no knowledge of nor care about the reason for the defederation, have all of their subscriptions disrupted. It’d be nice if it didn’t remove already-subscribed communities, and instead just prevented them from showing up to other users under the Communities list / in the ‘All’ list.
Yes, new instances usually automatically federate with everything. From what I’ve heard, there are “default” blocklists being maintained as far as what you might choose to block by default (so you don’t have to go through the growing pains yourself if you don’t want) or they could decide to whitelist instances which would then affect federation. And, as seen here, they can also defederate from any instance at any time if they feel the need.
If you’re running your own instance, of course, you’re the one calling the shots so you make those decisions and can federate with everything if that’s what you want.
I went over to kbin (I already had an account there) and replicated my subscription list as best I could. Splitting my time between here and there. I wish I didn’t have to have two separate accounts, though! I didn’t want to be fragmented.
