There is a lot of discussion happening in the background of our project here. We could not anticipate all of the challenges that we were going to face a few years ago. One of the reasons for this was because we had no idea what our choice of a platform would bring.
Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.
In the first year or so, this choice was completely successful for a very small number of users. And then we all experienced an enormous influx of users when Reddit announced/implemented their shutting down of third party apps.
Since then there has been a huge number of people that have joined the Beehaw project. This tsunami of users initiated technical problems, and otherwise, that we could not foresee.
Thankfully and fortunately, we have had a couple of incredibly knowledgeable persons that have swooped in to ’save the day’ and keep this site running.
Unfortunately, these persons will NOT be able to continue to support the Beehaw project much further. They have life commitments and other factors, including careers and family life, that will prevent them from contributing to our project in an ongoing fashion.
All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems that makes administration/moderation very painful.
Therefore, we are left with some options that may feel uncomfortable to us. For example, we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub. To explain, Fediverse/ActivityPub are very positive concepts on the foundational level. However, the Beehaw project is struggling to include this because most of our moderation/content/ethos is being jeopardized from OTHER federated instances (i.e. it, mostly, is NOT coming from within our own Beehaw registered user base).
The aforementioned persons, that have ’swooped in to save the day’, have been discussing/working with us to come up with the best solutions that would enable the Beehaw project to continue while NOT needing incredibly experienced/technically adept persons around.
Right now, we are testing alternative software platforms and evaluating them based on everything that we want Beehaw to become in the future.
Thank you all for your continued support of the Beehaw project and entrusting us to make this happen.
Comments/posts get moderated at the community level, any instance subscribing to it, will also receive the moderation notification to update its cache, so it doesn't need to be moderated again. In theory, an instance "could" ignore moderation actions for a community it's subscribed to, but that makes little sense.
A problem comes when a community decides not to remove a comment/post, then it gets spread to all instances that subscribe to that community. Only in that case federated instances need to apply additional moderation.
Federated instances subscribed to a community would have the option to either block the user, the comment, the post, the community, or the whole instance (defederate). Fine grained options like blocking a single user's every comment on a post, or on a community, or on an instance... or blocking every post by any user from an instance that they send to a community, or... etc. would be additional options... but Lemmy is lacking most of them.
So moderation isn't inhrently an exponential problem, but right now is limited to a blunt tool that mostly relies on the good faith of everyone for things to work... and it's been shown over and over that there are people acting in bad faith.
Thank you for that thorough explanation!