Asklemmy

I agree that if your goal is to be centralized, heavily control what your users see, and only your team is capable of doing such a thing, then federation is not the solution.

However, as someone on the outside looking in, I doubt you would have the user base you do, or maintain it for very long if it were just an old-style centralized forum. It seems to me that those forums were simply not preferable to the level of content and connectivity offered by the myspaces, facebooks, diggs, and reddits of the world.

If you're open to maintain interaction with other servers, and just find moderation too resource intensive, then I think you're probably just bigger than you can afford right now, and should shoot for fewer DAUs.

The number of people out there who want a safe space for the disenfranchised can't just be your moderation team, and that's why the fediverse exists. Amortize that responsibility over multiple instances, don't feel like it's something that only you are able to solve.

I have broadly enjoyed interacting with content and users from beehaw, but have also had friction with their moderation style at times. However that is is the point of the fediverse, my home account is not on beehaw, I don’t have to agree, I just have to play nice in the occasional thread.

Overall the federation adds content,variety, and texture to the fediverse and it’d be a shame to lose it

I can't give feedback without specifics on what exactly you feel the downsides are of federating.

I will say this: in my six months on kbin and Lemmy, I have seen more assumption of good faith in interactions, and I do believe Beehaw's users has been a significant part of that. It would be a negative for the Fediverse if Beehaw defederated. That said, the users are of course under no obligation to provide the emotional labor to make those kinds of efforts.

If the reason is because your mods are saying they can't handle the workload, I get it. I think that's a 100% valid reason for defederating, whether or not it's temporary as Lemmy's moderation support matures. It's already a challenging assignment, even without a stricter ethos like Beehaw's in place. In general, there are a lot of new mods across Lemmy, and it's a significant vulnerability, in my opinion. The next big surge of users, whether from Reddit imploding again or something else like a major publication's story on Lemmy going viral, won't be about creating more buckets for users like it was this past summer. It will stress the buckets themselves, and some of the mods holding those communities together won't be ready for it.

Bee-who?

I've always felt being on the fediverse was antithetical to Beehaw's mission. It wants to bee a kind, safe place for disenfranchised users, but it feels like less of a tight knit community when it is federated.

The best example I can think of is like a high-school club/group. Being on the fediverse is like your group claiming a table in a crowded lunch room. Yes you've got your group together where you can talk amongst yourselves, but everything you say can be heard by everyone else in the room and likewise their conversations are going to butt in whether you like it or not. An unfederated or semi-private forum is more like getting an unused classroom for your group to meet in. It's still open for anyone to join as long as they don't create trouble, but having your own room makes the conversation feel more personal/intimate and people are more likely to open up about personal stuff they wouldn't want to yell out in the lunch room.

Probably a poor analogy, and I may be misunderstanding their goal, but that's my 2 cents.

You pop in here and ask the community if we would be sad if you left? You're either phishing for a reason to leave by garnishing negative sentiment, further driving your "parishioners" to WANT defederation, or you are wanting to tarnish Lemmy as a platform, or both. Various sects of Christianity do this manipulative shit all the time. They force their flock to spread the word knowing full well they will face negativity -- no one likes to be solicited to -- and come crying to the church about their treatment, where the church comforts them and reinforces why only they can provide safety and warmth. It's cult tactics.

You don't want to know if you should defederate from the rest of us, you want to spread doubt in the platform and wall yourselves off to the world that doesn't conform to your views. You talk about negative aspects of Lemmy without offering any specifics and/or providing solutions to things you find problematic. To me, that's a red flag for someone wanting attention for a decision they already made. There's a sarcastic reply to that, I believe it's "bye Felicia."

Good riddance. All an instance acting like a walled garden does is hurt the entire space, and that doesn't just apply to beehaw.

Side note; what the hell do you have against serial experiments lain? It's weird that it's on the list thrice, and I didn't even know there were new sites about lain, so thanks for that i guess.

You guys aren't nice, so I'd rather you left

Personally I would like to see you have private communities on your instance and public ones and let your users CHOOSE whether they want to how other instances blocked (you could even default to a white list).

Federation is awesome but I also get wanting more private groups

I've had mostly negative interactions with ultra left beehaw users, so if that's who you aim to protect from a real world reality check, by all means.

Lemmy is even more left wing than reddit. Going full isolation would turn yall into hexbear, probably.

Are you okay with that risk?