My first account on the fediverse was on Beehaw and I was happy with it, but defederating from two of the largest instances gave me a reason to find a new instance. Personally I understand and respect the decision -that is the point of the fediverse afterall.
They had a lot of good communities that will not be cut off from the fastest growing instances which will make things tough to rebuild I think.
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i’m new here but i was on reddit for a long time, and was around during the attempted voat migration.
the main obstacle to a new platform succeeding is that you need a critical mass of content. Of all the people who join, only 10% or so will be actively posting, the rest are just here to consume.
beehaw had a lot of activity, and a few of their subs got to what I consider a critical mass for good discussion. and now they’ve gone rogue.
I understand the mods had a hard time, but… seriously, this is a huge blow to the fediverse. of all the actions anyone could have done, they’ve done the most damage to the success of the fediverse, right at a time when growth and activity here is crucial.
I can’t help but think the mods could have asked for help moderating. it’s a sad sad situation.
i’m personally not going to contribute there anymore, because I want the fediverse as a whole to take off.
I really don’t get why they didn’t bring on more mods from their community. They’ve been around for more than 6 months. There’s no users that have earned the admins’ trust in that time?
Moderation is thankless work that comes with heaping helpings of scorn from the community. Even if you’re doing it purely because you want to see the community succeed, you will be accused of doing it because you’re a petty tyrant who likes to lord it over other people. Plus, of course, moderation itself is work and it’s usually not very fun work. I’ve moderated online discussions before and it really wears you down after a while.
It doesn’t surprise me that it’s hard to find a lot of trusted users who also want to be moderators.
100%, they are really shooting themselves in the foot by defederating
Hopefully, we can get some better mod tools into Lemmy soon, which will result in even instances like Beehaw not having to worry about federating with big instances.
I think the main current outcome of decision will be that Lemmy users will be hesitant to start any bigger communities on beehaw.org, but this is probably a positive outcome for Beehaw admins in terms of what their goals are.Users can’t create communities on Beehaw anyway, so this point is moot.As for what this means for lemm.ee: based on their reasoning in the post, I think it’s entirely possible that they will keep defederating instances which grow beyond a certain point, and lemm.ee might reach that size soon as well. So I would recommend keeping this in mind while you plan where to house your communities etc - if you’re interested in what Beehaw has to offer, then it might be best to preemptively go directly to them, and conversely, if you’re more interested in the wider federated network, then building communities on instances such as lemm.ee would be the safer bet.
Edit: I posted a comment asking if beehaw.org might defederate lemm.ee in the future if we grow more, their response for now was that they doubt it.
That response to your comment is good news. Ultimately, it sounds like Beehaw is open to refederating if they get access to better mod tools and/or those other instances institute similar measures to lemm.ee.
I think it’s entirely possible that they will keep defederating instances which grow beyond a certain point, and lemm.ee might reach that size soon as well.
isn’t lemmy.world like… 20x our instance?
Yep, and one scenario is for sure that growth will slow down. But on the other hand, if growth continues at the current place, then in 2-3 months, lemm.ee will be just as big as lemmy.world is today.
And there is also the potential scenario that growth will actually speed up - who knows what will happen when 3rd party Reddit apps start shutting down, for example.
Hey Sunaurus, I’m just throwing my hat in the ring that I’d be happy to contribute to any additional moderation efforts that may be necessary to keep lemm.ee reputable in the eyes of the broader fediverse; I work in IT from home so I spend quite a bit of time available at the computer if yaknow what I’m sayin
I appreciate the offer and I’ll keep you in mind!
I think it’s unfortunate, however I’m damn glad I made my main account here so it doesn’t really impact my experience much. Them being able to make this move and community members being able to migrate to other instances if they don’t like it are what make this less of a problem than it would be otherwise. Better they show their hand early.
Sad to see, but in the end it will hurt them more than the rest of the fediverse.
things like this, especially right now, are what will limit the appeal of lemmy and the fediverse in general sadly. People no longer have access to communities they like randomly due to the decision of one person at the top… almost like why people were trying to leave reddit in the first place
