Since my last post yesterday, lemmy.world has added over 3000 new users, bringing the total user count to 22000 today (source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list). It firmly holds the position of the second-largest lemmy instance, passing beehaw.org by a large margin of 10000 users.
In other news, beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world a few hours ago. How does the third-largest instance only have 4 mods admins for its 12000 users?!
So much going on!
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Beehaw never wanted to be “reddit but federated”. It has always wanted to be a nice community with certain ideals. Defederating servers with a shortage of moderators has to be done or for those ideals to be worth anything.
It seems odd to me that Beehaw would choose a federated model if this is truly their approach.
The whole point of federation is that you’ll have everyone from everywhere in your community, with exceptions for bad actors.
If Beehaw says “We want our community to be unified and work exactly as we say” it just seems like they should have forked Tildes or something?
I was talking to one of the Beehaw admins the other day and I think they mentioned they came from Tildes because they disagreed with how Deimos was running things or something like that. But Tildes is open-source and non-federated, so it seems like the more natural place to jump to for what they want to do?
Yeah, why pioneer a free and open platform just so you can curate a censored and closed echo chamber? That’s why I chose Kbin, ernest seems much more interested in the success and development of the community and platform than enforcing whatever flavor of ideology.
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People outside beehaw can still comment there and people inside beehaw would still see these comments.
This posts explains better how it works https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/24341/How-the-beehaw-defederation-affects-us
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Now that BeeHaw has defederated, they won’t see any comments from lemmy.world/shitjustworks users in their own communities.
If they kept federation, those users would be able to comment on beehaw.org communities.
Sorry for the confusion, I meant that, if they didn’t defederate and their users just kept on their ‘local’ feed, they’d still see outside comments.
The problem is that if you filter by “local”, you don’t just get comments and posts from your instance. You get content from local communities.
All the spam and rule breaking accounts still make it through to the communities on beehaw.
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If this is anything like the mastodon.social debacle, things will probably settle down eventually. Moderation tools will be built, the more moderators will compensate for the explosive growth, and in time federation will probably happen again. It’s a real shame, but with 22k users moderated by 4 admins just isn’t going to prevent toxicity and abuse from spreading.
I also think things would significantly improve if users were able to block whole instances (say, lemmygrad, exploding-heads, etc.) instead of having to rely on moderators to take full defederation action.
The defederation risk is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to host my own instance (though that means I’ll never make it into the whitelist-only federated lemmies). I can hardly disagree with the Beehaw admins at this stage, but it’s still a shame to see it happen.
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You should still be able to view and comment on beehaw as normal so you don’t have to miss those communities. Defederation is a one way street. So it’s just like lemmy.world doesn’t exist as far as beehaw is concerned. We can’t have any impact on their vote counts from their perspective, they won’t see our comments regardless of the instance it’s posted on, they can’t visit any communities from lemmy.world, etc. But unless lemmy.world defederates from beehaw we will still be able to view, vote on, comment on, etc anything from beehaw as normal. It’s just that you are less likely to get any sort of interaction so you are disincentivized from doing so. Technically we could still comment on a beehaw post and anyone from lemmy.world or any other instance that hasn’t defederates with us would still be able to see and reply to that comment.
Edit: for anyone reading this, the truth is somewhere in between. See the link to the post in the comment below mine to get more clarification.
That’s very interesting. I didn’t realize it worked that way. You’re saying when one instance comments on a external instance the comment itself is still hosted by the first instance? It is hosted in the first instance and and update is sent to the external instance which would host a duplicate copy (but in this case is rejected)?
I’ve read most of the Lemmy documentation but these nuances of the architecture aren’t well covered.
Edit: just found this post which clarifies it all: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Thanks for the link. It cleared up a slight misunderstanding that I had as well.
Nah, de-federation means they won’t be seeing anything from lemmy.world on:
They will still see lemmy.world comments on other instances, but lemmy.world posts won’t appear on the ALL sorting.
In the same way lemmy.world won’t be able to see beehaw posts.
Basically,
No, they can choose to see content from local communities. The users posting in those communities, and the people commenting on those posts, can still come from any federated site.