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Is defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works still necessary? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by theangriestbird@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org

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This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I'm wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I'm just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

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[–] Leafeytea@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, I think it's best that we stay the way we are here and not re-federate.

My experience after leaving all the toxicity of Reddit behind was that it was really a blessing to find a community where moderation actually mattered and made a difference in the culture of site. I did a lot of lurking on Lemmy even before leaving Reddit, enough to know it was not a place for me. I tried Kbin when I did finally leave Reddit, but did not like the experience there much, so eventually landed here.

While I can appreciate people's concerns about the defederation, and in particular some of the stresses for the admins which are certainly really challenging, I think it would all be far more negative if at this stage the decision were to be reversed. Not every community needs to be "the biggest, baddest, baddy in the room" so to speak. I just get the impression the vision for Lemmy is something along those lines. No one seems to care about that here (that I can tell), they just care about having civil and open discussions which, more than anything else, feel safe. It's why I stay and am glad to support it. If that changed, I would most likely move on and not return.

[–] CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really think this needs to be fixed by a system that allows for the user to decide on their own content federation.

I think communities should be able to block users and communities from seeing and interacting with their content, but the problem is that currently defederation means that the home instance can block what you see of other instances.

This can be fixed either by still allowing data to be sent out to severs but not in from them mostly. Or it can be fixed by making unified user accounts that can persist on multiple servers and therefore go around defederation.

Why do this? Because I guarantee there are users here like myself who wouldn’t mind viewing content on other servers and so instead we’d be forced to make and use another account. The less accounts per person, the better imo. Because creating many account discourages community and harms vetting processes.

[–] theangriestbird@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

i hear you, and that's why i made this post. After reading through the replies though, I think it makes more sense for beehaw to stay defederated. The way it blocks us from using those communities is a little annoying, but i think it's better if you think of it like each lemmy server is it's own social media site that happens to have some ways of communicating with other sites, rather than thinking of all lemmy servers together as one site.

That's really the spirit of the thing - you don't get mad at Facebook because they don't let you view and comment on reddit posts from facebook. Currently, the connection between Beehaw and Lemmy.World is mostly the same.