Asklemmy

The fact that you talk about users as "seeking refuge" means you think of your instance as much more than a social media platform.

So I would say that yes, maybe Lemmy is not what you actually need. It's designed to federate discussions between everyone using it, and that's a poor fit for a refugee center (so to speak).

Indifferent

Late Reply: This is going to sound harsh but it's true. I wouldn't miss it. If Beehaw disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn't even notice, and I'm sure that would be the case for many other people here. The problem is that because Beehaw has defederated so aggressively from the largest instances and shut its doors to new users, and people just moved on, or didn't notice or care. I spent most of my first days on Lemmy.world and consequently didn't see a majority of the content from Beehaw, but I did see many upset users who had to Migrate from Beehaw due to the defederations since most of the content and communities they wanted access to wasn't available to them on Beehaw.

Since Beehaw didn't (and still doesn't) have community creation enabled it never really had niche communities like other instances did, it is rather forgettable because of that, what most people will remember it for though is the defederations and having to migrate accounts to not be cut off from the rest of the fediverse.

Do what you need to do, but it'll mean less traffic on overall - meaning people who are actively pro-ActivityPub will be switching and using other accounts more. I would probably be out shopping for a different node at that point. But I also fully understand the reasons why one would want to defederate.

Don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass on the way out.

You're smaller and weaker defederated. The fact that you chose to post this on lemmy.ml rather than beehaw clearly proves that.

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."

Defederate from .world and aaaaallllll of your problems will go away. EDIT: you already did and that wasn't enough. Well time to pull the plug.

Who gives a fuck what others think, they have the power to block communities/instances if they want. No need to make that choice for them. I like the content, and if I didn't then it's as simple as just blocking the domain. That's the nice thing about the fedi.

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.

While I would understand your reasoning for doing so, I would be disappointed to see it happen. There's decent discussions on Beehaw that I enjoy taking part in, however if you guys decided to defederate or switch to a different platform entirely, I doubt that I would make another account somewhere else to follow. I like Beehaw's content, but I have enough accounts to keep track of these days after everything split from Reddit, so it would ultimately be a loss for me.

I'm not sure if this is a commonly-held opinion for those of us outside of Beehaw, though.

Bee-who?

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'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.

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.

I don’t give a single nacho

I feel like I've given my answer to this question regarding Beehaw once before...

But as I see it, the main driving force and overall source of value for services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc., is federation. That is to say, federation among a wide variety of different users and servers across the fediverse using protocols like ActivityPub is what sets this entire thing apart from legacy centralized and corporate social media, like Reddit or "X".

I was initially on Beehaw myself and I liked the mature and kind atmosphere, but I ended up splitting for Kbin due to issues with defederation (on top of being curious and interested in Kbin as an alternative software to lemmy). But whether we're talking about "Beehaw.org" or "Kbin.social", in my view the federation is a huge part of the appeal, and I wouldn't see myself continuing to use a server if it cut itself off from the rest of the network, regardless of whether they did it for "good reasons" or not.

Like, if Beehaw wants to be just a significantly smaller and more highly moderated centralized alternative to Reddit, that feels like a pretty weak pitch which, at best, might end up with a community roughly the size of a classic forum. I'm not really interested in that. I want the Fediverse to succeed as a decentralized, open, scalable, and community-moderated alternative to legacy social media. Frankly, my interest in Beehaw as a community hinges completely on it being a part of that movement or not.

I can understand how federation may have posed significant challenges towards your goal of detailed moderation and creating a safe and friendly space, but only in the sense that you were possibly not fully prepared for the level of exposure to a large number of federated users. But even so, if Beehaw is ever to grow into something bigger (which, to be honest, is not a given, especially if you set out on your own as just another disconnected and insular social media website), you will eventually have to deal with the harsh reality that the kind of moderation that you're interested in doing is going to be a significant challenge as your community scales, federated or not. (For example, you may be prepared to moderate content in English, but are you prepared to moderate content in other languages? How will you know when someone starts spreading disinformation and hate speech in Burmese?)

Finally, I think you might want to consider the general movement towards federated social media. Between ActivityPub and the Fediverse, Meta's interest in federating Threads, BlueSky being developed around federation to some extent, federation support in things like WordPress, and a number of other social media platforms tip-toeing their way into the idea, I personally feel that there is a pretty interesting paradigm shift happening right now. Some of that has to do with moderation, responsibility and government pressure on big tech, I think.

But nevertheless, social media is gradually moving towards federation, and I think that's a good thing for the internet as a whole. You nice people at Beehaw will really have to search yourselves to determine whether you see the value in federation (both in terms of connecting people, but also in terms of allowing various communities to self-moderate to some extent) or not.

I do hope you'll stay, even though it means facing the growing pains of moderation challenges sooner rather than later, because the fediverse is better with us all connected and communicating together. I'll be sticking with the fediverse with or without Beehaw, but I do wish you all luck in your goals should you decide to set out on your own.

I'm not a beehaw user, so personally I won't care. If I had joined beehaw in order to get to a federated platform, turning it into a walled garden would be disappointing to say the least. I'd leave, of course.

In general, it would be a shame to lose the content and connections that there might have been.