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?

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    Having accounts on both instances, I can say the “cultural” difference is the moderation style, and user expectations:

    • Lemmy World: Reddit-like rules, a huge influx of Reddit refugees who think every comment has to go against the parent one, free registration which makes it easy to create an account and go troll mode on federated instances.
    • Beehaw: Very open-ended but at the same time strict “be nice” moderation with minimal rules, users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.
    • Lemmygrad, Hexbear, Exploding heads, etc: I think the cultural differences are obvious there.
    • Other instances: they have much smaller user bases than Lemmy World, so even when there are cultural differences (dbzer0, lemm.ee, etc), they are not overwhelming (yet) the mod team on Beehaw.

    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.