Out of the loop

All of these services are very new. Exactly what people want out of them — including what the people operating instances want out of them — is still being worked out.

This is not a commercial production service that you have a contract with. It's an experimental system run by volunteers who don't all have the same ideas in mind. People aren't just working out the kinks — the process of discovering what this is all really for is still ongoing.

Expect friction. Expect weirdness. Expect rapid growth and, therefore, rapid change.

Also, expect people to fuss when they get surprised they can't do something they want to. That's also normal.

Beehaw is meant to be a safe space, mitigating toxicity, while other instances, by having registration open to all without moderation, causes that.

By being federated, they can interact with one another. Beehaw defederated them in order to avoid that. The main argument being that the modding tools right now aren't good enough to help them do it any other way.

The short version is that beehaw was struggling with the (currently) limited toolset available to moderate user content, and they saw a heap of users posting things they don't allow on their instance were coming from the two other big instances, so it was more effective for them to defederate to try and stem the tide.

I imagine regeneration will occur in future when the lemmyverse stabilises a little, and when better mod tools are available

lemmy.world has had a handful of back to back queerphobic trolls spamming hate across multiple groups and instances.

They would get banned and come right back.

The reason they were able to do that is because of the open signups on lemmy.world.

Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.

And so they blocked lemmy.world, as it was a source of bigotry towards their members, and there were no other moderation tools available to them to resolve the issue.

They defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works apparently due to trolls. We got a post over on our main chat by some asshat who claimed to have posted dick pics on a feminist community over there and has since been banned. It's largely due to the open registration policy both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have. They are probably going to blanket ban any instances with open registration.

Beehaw's Explanation

Sounds like they want a safe space, and federating with more lax servers makes it hard to do that, so they've essentially blocked everyone coming from lemmy.world

beehaw.org blocked lemmy.world. which works like you'd expect blocking someone would work. they can't interact with each other, can't participate in each other's communities, etc.

Content from another instance only shows up on lemmy.world and you can only participate there with your lemmy.world account if the other instance federates with lemmy.world. Beehaw is not a fan of the higher moderation workload with the influx of lemmy.world users, whether they're real people or bots. That's why they decided to stop federating with instances with open registration, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Some people are pretty upset about the decision while others show more understanding or even welcome the step by the Beehaw admins.

Beehaw Announcement

Seems reasonable.

I imagine an influx of ~100,000 Redditors is gonna be stressful on any community.