this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
That's because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I'm talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.
But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don't form communities or that there's no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.
Now I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with the system they've chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.
Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.
A couple of weeks is more than enough time to realize where things were headed and act. lemmy.ml managed to do it.
lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasn't the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?
The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
I'm not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.
I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.
you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.
I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.
The moderated, reasonable stance is that everyone is right! Beehaw probably could have done things differently, including making a stickied post that they don’t want to be the default large instance, and/or acquired a lot more mods to manage the federation of other large instances. On the other hand, Lemmy doesn’t have the same principles as Beehaw and prioritized the growth of their userbase over a filtering system. To you it looks like one is worse than the other, that’s because you want to see content from everywhere and don’t share the principles of the other federation - so you’re probably not a good fit for Beehaw atm (and if anyone is blindsided, I don’t get it.. I could see it written all over Beehaw that they are trying to promote certain principles over growth, I don’t share in those principles but I can respect that they were direct about it).
Everyone on the Fediverse should expect to see instances un/re-federate several times over especially in the growing stages. The critique is fine but it should definitely be tempered with reasonable expectations and not unnecessary ridicule.
The idea that people are missing content on Lemmy/Beehaw/Kbin instances that get defederated are looking at this from a “this should be super convenient” mentality which, convenience is why Reddit expects you’ll go back. Quality of content, genuine community-building, and/or responsible upper management doesn’t have as much value there, it is inherent in them being a VC, convenience is what matters most on Reddit/TikTok/Twitter/etc.
On the Fediverse, the one thing that should be said more is that the instance you join, you should prepare to be involved locally through that instance more than anything else. The idea you can or should just join anywhere was something I wrong wrong about, as was much of the Reddit people saying “join Lemmy it doesn’t matter where, it’s all federated.” I don’t blame them or myself, it’s a newer concept and nuance is lost at the entry- level to anything. If people were coming to the Fediverse for fully federated, more convenient content than they should try Mastadon, because they’re farther along and had their own issues to deal with during the Twitter migration that propelled them much like these instances that are still growing and learning will, in time.
There are 4 admins and 30-something mods.