No Stupid Questions

I actually moved from Beehaw to Lemmy.world when that happened, but I have no bad feelings for the Beehaw admins. They’re trying to create a community that is probably a bit more serious and inclusive than most servers do, which obviously is not at all a bad thing by itself.

They noticed an influx of legitimately hateful posts from 2 specific instances, and Lemmy mod tools being young, they didn’t have many other paths forward than defederating the whole instances, even if 99% of the content on those instances were not a problem. Also, they highlighted in their post about it that they’re a tiny team, so they wouldn’t be able to mod finely the massive amount of contents that are coming from all instances if they could anyway; which poses really interesting questions about how Lemmy moderation efforts will be able to scale over time.

But anyway, now Lemmy.world people can’t see recent BeeHaw content, and BeeHaw people can’t see recent Lemmy.world content. BeeHaw is a bit more serious like I was saying, so with a lot of interesting and thought-provoking content coming from Lemmy.world, my feed had gotten somewhat boring… so I switched!

I'm not boycotting them, just unsubbed from any communities I was in on them. I'll rejoin when they got it figured out. If moderation is a problem for them, I'm not going to add to the load.

Well you can't interact with the beehaw server if you are from a blocked instance, I'm from lemmy.world so I guess I'm boycotting them but not by choice. I would not have cared at all but they my instance got blocked so I had to unsub from all beehaw communities since it's useless to be subbed from a blocked instance. I'm not going to make another account just for beehaw. Beehaw has blocked over 200 instances, so it's nothing new for them. Beehaw will not federated again unless lemmy devs meet their demands. Idk. I think the whole thing is dumb, if you go on beehaw you can read their POV. You have to be nice when interacting with beehaw or else you get banned. Only 4 admins moderate all of beehaw. Enough trolls go on beehaw and your instance gets blocked because that's the only thing the admins there know how to deal with it. I'm not aware of a boycott, but wouldn't be surprised if people are upset.

To be very brief:

Beehaw seeks primarily to protect its users and create a space where they aren't going to be attacked for being who they are.

The Beehaw admins noticed they were dealing with a lot of hate from 2 lemmy instances which had open sign ups.

Beehaw defederated from those 2 instances.

There's been some kickback from people who think defederating goes against the core values of Lemmy.

That's all I've got, I'm sure others will be able to add to this

Behaw was simply first to recognize a problem, massive influx of bot accounts. There are some instances where Beehaw defederated due to content, most notably lemmygrad which is a pro Marxist site, but most of the others are due to bot abuse.

Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world because they were not using strict enough options for the account creation process. Right now there's three settings admins can enable or disable for user authentication, captcha, email, and application. Lemmy.world was using only one.

There's a bit of flux now since the recently released 0.18.0 version of Lemmy has the captcha method temporarily disabled due do migration away from web sockets, but that should be resolved in 0.18.1. There's going to be some turmoil in federation until things get worked out. The bot problem is a biggie.

In the meantime if you really want to interact with a Beehaw community, log onto an instance that is not blocked (go to beehaw.org and select Instances link bottom of page). Mine is not. Otherwise admins can petition other admins for re-federation. I would expect lemmy.world to get things worked out with Beehaw at some point, but you could mention it to an admin there and possibly generate some priority.

I don't think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn't good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.