My second day using Lemmy and infighting is already destroying it.

What was their reason for defederating? I tried to read their post and it didn’t make sense to me.

To be honest, as time went by and a few of my subreddits I frequented started to get brigaded by transphobes and fascist bawbags (Scotland and unitedkingdom subs are a great example of this) I stopped participating altogether in them.

I found the casualuk sub and that became pretty much the only place I’d comment/post. It felt like a much closer-knit community and I’d much rather have that than a massive community that may not feel as “homely” if that makes sense.

EDIT - I replied to the wrong post, I've not had a coffee yet.

Seems like there should be a notice when a community is just a copy that isn't being updated anymore, to encourage people to abandon it and use one that is updated across instances. Or discourage them from subscribing to it.

Man this is starting to sound like reddit 2.0 where everything is walled off depending on what your subscribed to

similar to truth.social is a never federated, modified mastodon instance. good luck

Thank you, that is a great explanation.

I do get where Beehaw admins are coming from. They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers. Unless Lemmy moderation tools get better, that seems like an OK temporary solution. Though, it is still kinda unfortunate that federated services, while being a great idea overall, are so prone to balkanization (that is, essentially, the fragmentation of mastodon situation all over again) but it gives user choice.

Why did they defederate us?

Amazing post with great info, thank you! There literally nothing in UI to let people know this is how it works tho and relies on words of mouth sharing. Communities essentially look exactly the same but like there's been no activity unless lemmy.world users post in it so you have to be able to guess posts are on a defederated instance or be hypervigilant in checking usernames if you haven't seen any posts about it, or are a new user in a week when this is t discussed as frequently. This is a huge oversight tbh and leaves me feeling a little uneasy. With more questions.

For example the LGBTQ community hosted on beehaw. Hypothetically say all of us genuine users who are aware of this unsubscribe because we find other communities that allow us to participate with a wider community. The shell community is still there, using beehaw branding, looks like a legit LGBTQ space but is now exclusively populated by trolls and unfortunate users who have missed announcements that this has happened. Nothing in the UI informs anyone posting or commenting there that it is not the true instance, and therefore no longer moderated by the owners.

Unaware user who already subscribed before the defederation posts a topic they want to discuss in a few weeks time, and suddenly they're flooded with highly upvoted troll responses That post ends up on the lemmy.world local/all page and is broadcast to other users who may not be aware, and a lot of new users who have no idea this ever happened. Now Beehaw is known as a hub for homophobic trolls that allows queer users to be trolled, and the trolls know they can get away with it in that community. Sure, eventually someone will come in to let that user know what's up and where to go, but by that time the damage is already done.

That also leads me to question how reporting works for this type of thing. If I report a user for breaking sub rules on the false version, who does that report go to? Is it a random lemmy.world mod/admin because we are both lemmy.world users in a community without beehaws mods or is it lost to the ether because there's no longer a connection to beehaw mods? If it goes to world mods, what if someone violates the subs rules that are still shown on the false instance, but not lemmy.world rules? My understanding was that moderation happened in communities by the host instance so does that mean these shell communities are completely unmoderated? That makes me feel very uncomfortable that these shell communities are even still available to world users, if it is the case, and should be cause for a mutual defederation until it's addressed but I'd like to have my reasoning corrected here if I'm off base. I'm still learning but this has me a little concerned so would appreciate being corrected if I'm wrong.

Its convenience. 99% don't care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.

Say I never read about these news: am I able to somehow see that a community belongs to a defederated instance, or do I have to guess based on the (lack of) new activity?

@AgentGoldfish

In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but how is it "worse for them"? Sure, if your goal is to create a big community, it's obviously bad, and perhaps it will lead to the death of that community. But their main goal isn't growth, it's having a "save space" and highly moderated community.

In your opinion, how should they have acted to achieve that goal when according to them, they are not able to moderate that much content at the moment in a way they want to? Lemmy.world allows any user to register without any vetting and is one of the biggest communities, does it not make sense to temporarily block content from here to decrease the amount of content to moderate?

I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren't in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I'm not holding that against them, that's to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.

Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?

I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I've seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?

Great write up! Definitely going to point this to people who ask me about how fed stuff works

If you look at the table on Awesome Lemmy Instances, Beehaw is far and away the most block-happy instance around, blocking over 70% of all instances in the Fediverse. They seem to see it as the defacto way to manage their instance.

Makes sense since, as other users have pointed out, the whole instance seems to be run by only a handful of the same Admins/Mods, so they are likely stretched very thin and are just taking the biggest swings they can to manage everything. They either need a major overhaul to their approach or that instance is going to fade into nothing.