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?
My understanding is admins of some of those communities actually agreed with the decision because of the lack of proper moderation tools to handle their new scale. Some are basically un-moderated as well.
Speaking for Lemmy World - we look for new moderators when we notice communities are un-moderated. We follow the reports closely and if we notice they aren’t picked up by that community’s moderators we reach out.
And yes, we were also told initially that it was because of a lack of moderation tools but now @Lionir@beehaw.org seems indicate a “cultural” difference. But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
Having accounts on both instances, I can say the “cultural” difference is the moderation style, and user expectations:
The problem is not just having moderators on LW, but moderating LW’s userbase on federated instances. Some number of LW’s users seem to be hostile towards Beehaw, and there is little LW can do about that other than banning their accounts, which I don’t think would be that much better for anyone.
Didn’t have to be an essay, it just had to be something that answered the 3 questions it asked about why you want to join beehaw.
Precisely. I think the “write an essay” has become kind of a meme among non-Beeple about Beehaw at this point; I first saw it on Reddit a couple months ago, kept seeing it on and off, and just today saw it again.
It was also in part what made me join: when I saw what it was all about, I was like “so… people who believe that thinking before answering is too much effort, won’t be here… nice…” 😄
The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway. Either it’s too much to ask of them to write a couple of sentences, or they haven’t even bothered to look and inform themselves before spitting their hot take. Neither personality is desirable lol
The TLDR behavior and won’t click offsite links and references and want a constant stream of tiny little ideas. There was a time when Reddit wasn’t like that and it became the culture of TLDR and downvote-disagree.
Reddit could have single-handedly taken on clickbait in 2014 or earlier by people replacing news headlines with sincere earnest descriptions. But the clickbait became what people swam in.
My friend put some pretty simple stuff and got denied. Granted it may have been during a negative influx
Feel free to message me on Beehaw or email at support@beehaw.org, I’ll review the message and say why I might’ve denied it though I can’t answer for others.
For sure, I’ll let him know if he’s still interested :) he mostly uses the toot style so he’s mostly on mastodon these days, but always happy to share community!
Really more than anything he’s looking for Gundam and Gunpla communities
Yes, there are differences in site culture between Beehaw and Lemmy.world that make the need for moderation higher.
Appreciate the insight. I have heard many variations of what went down/what the reasoning was and it’s all sort of unclear to me to be honest. But ultimately I think if instances weren’t supposed to defederate, then the option wouldn’t exist. Mistake or not it’s their call!
Have you asked them?
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