I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don’t need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn’t aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I’ve been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that’s understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They’d be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
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The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it’s hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain’t helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
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So literally “Suffering from success”
Yeah I think a migration tool would be very helpful. I basically just signed up for the first instance that looked good without doing much research.
Having to do so much research just to join an instance is one of the biggest problems of the fediverse.
I saw some advice saying “don’t overthink it, just choose one” and I’m glad I didn’t take it because it seems like it couldn’t be any further from the truth. Until migrating your account is an option, this just seems like a bunch of Reddits talking to each other, you can still lose everything if your local admin goes on a power trip.
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and “link” it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won’t go that far, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
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This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.
On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes
I think people have a right to be upset when they feel unfairly banned from communities for no fault of their own.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
I guess the others will need to work with them to fix the issues that resulted in this decision.
It’s all about teamwork across the verse and we’ll have to see if they can manage it.
Extremely well put. Community migration should be something that would definitely be needed.
This may be the most well thought out response I’ve seen yet.
So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
Moving communities is tricky (even assuming the technical side is implemented) since you would need to figure out how many of your subscribers are on instances who are blocked by your community’s new home before picking one.
This is a very good write up. I think there is a big difference in responsiblilty between community hosting instances and viewing instances, and I believe that we will see issues like this more often as community size is ballooning due to the reddit issues. I do believe, or maybe it’s more of a hope, that over time larger communities will bounce around instances until they land on an instance that can better handle the responsibility of moderation, and eventually we’ll end up with a few large instances that host popular communities, and smaller instance that host more niche communities.
I feel that this is the growing pains stage of Lemmy, and if a few QoL features like community migration get worked in, this platform will stabilize into something great.
btw, e-mail servers regularly defederate/block domains that allow a lot of spam…
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with only FOUR moderators. That was never going to work.
might be a dumb question, but how could’ve they prevented this?
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
They’ve existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
And if they haven’t…well, that’s telling on it’s own, too.
Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.
I had hopes for it but I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.
I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.
Exactly, they got rid of actual voting in order to power moderate. This is all on them, users could also block whatever communities they didn’t like.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that’s possible.
Edit: I’ve been told by another user that this isn’t currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
Their post explains why your suggestions are not actionable.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can’t one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
I just unsubbed from anything that was with them. Fuck em.
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
Is there a SubRedditDrama community equivalent here?
There is a fediverse drama sub in lemmy.ca
I am a lurker over there so this decision literally changes nothing about how I use beehaw and my community is still awesome so I’m all good👍
Shh 🤫 they might defederate us too if we say too much
I’m on midwest.social and I’m a lurker so I got nothing to lose DEFERATE ME DEFERATE DIZ NUTS
Yet another reason why it’s great to be Canadian.
Sh.itjustworks is Canadian lol
Oh, that’s cool! Didn’t know.
Not cool actually 😂, but whatever 😂.
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won’t run their own instance.
I don’t think running your own instance is required, just that the user base needs to be distributed across more instances. The happy median lies somewhere between “uber” instances and self-hosted.
Yes, but the common user would just register on the most popular instance. It will take a lot of effort to change that mindset.
raises hand
I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.
Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.
There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.
Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice…absolutely not. Did it work… sort of.
beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and “high quality” community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.
I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.
I posted this there, but since you can’t see it
“I wonder if the type of community you’re trying to build wouldn’t be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature.”
I think they’ve picked the wrong tool for what they’re trying to do.
Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can’t scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.
yea, four people is not enough for even the smallest community.
Glancing at my one-member Poetry community here:
C’mon, you what’ll you do if you get out of hand, need at least 7 to handle that
I honestly think it’s somewhat irresponsible to have allowed themselves to grow as they did with only four moderators. Other instances have closed registration to maintain healthy growth. That should’ve happened long before this point.
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Exactly. Moderation abilities are just as important as hardware requirements.
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They also spend more time chatting on discord rather than modding lol
It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server. with the limited mod tools available at the moment that is completely impossible to manage.
I hope they can get past this hurdle.
I’ve got to learn Rust like a madman so I can help implement mod tools. That’s honestly the main bottleneck alongside discoverability.
Elsewhere in the thread right now there’s an open troll. On Reddit you get silenced at -100 karma. What happens on Lemmy? Anything?
As far as I know there are no automod functions currently, so until a human mod manually deletes or bans that user, it will just stay there.
Tools will come, the code for the platform is fully open and the API well documented, so it wont be long before large communities can function fully federated with reasonable moderation.
It doesn’t help that notifications are pretty nonexistent at times. You have to actively go to an instance via browser, or open jerboa to find out anything is going on. Well, I haven’t found any other way to get mod notifications, and I’ve tried a couple of times.
So, for non admin mods to help out there, they’d have to commit to a higher degree of focus than what most people can offer.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server
Why would they think that would be enough to withstand the waves from reddit? That was just a disaster waiting to happen.
happened too fast for them I guess.
once better mod tools or possibly an invite only read-only sort of solution is available they would re-open to other large instances.
I honestly doubt they’ll open again, they’ll get so used to their safe-space that they won’t be able to handle all the shitposting.
And we know mod tools can only do so much, if they couldn’t handle it with not so many users, I don’t know what are they going to do later if more instances keep appearing and growing.
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There should be a way to export and import your subscriptions and saved posts so that you can easily transfer accounts to different instances.
Agreed. I’m not excited to have my history tied to one instance.
I think it’s also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities
Reading through the comments in their post I’m losing the little sympathy I was feeling. It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw. That feels shortsighted and selfish, and I would think most communities on that end on the block would block them reciprocally.
It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw.
Was this in the comments of the defederation post or one of the other ones? I’m just curious to read it myself.
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https://lemmy.one/comment/177082
~~https://beehaw.org/comment/177082~~
I believe this is the comment being referenced
Edit: They both link to the same comment, take your pickI think the comment they were referring to is this one: #264724
BTW FYI the two links you posted are not to the same comment. The second one is from a total different discussion too.
The comment id varies from instance to instance.
Jerboa doesn’t take me to the comment directly but I’m going to assume this is the one lol
It was part of the annoucement .
After reading many comments I think my ‘outrage’ came, as it often does, from misunderstanding. Also, because when singing up most people say don’t overthink it, it doesn’t matter much. But now I’m seeing that it does matter to sign up for an instance with like minded people. As I see more of what seems to be the drive behind beehaw, it doesn’t really resonate with what I want, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It is ok for that group of people. We just need to make sure that communities of general interest that were taking off there because they were one of the largest instances are also present in a more open and accessible place, so we are not restricted to collaborate.
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They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that’s admirable but the tools don’t exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.
Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.
Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.
But that is an issue too. Why would other instances allow them full access while being prevented from collaborating in theirs ?
I’m not really keen on their reasons for defederating, but this makes no sense to me. What do I care if a beehaw user is posting good content on my community but I can’t go to their instance? It’s still more content and engagement for my community.
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problem is you don’t have to start slinging slurs to troll people. People can still be nuisances and say bigoted things.
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I see your point. I was seeing it from the perspective of discouraging stuff to be shared on other communities because it’s already in beehaw, but you’d need an account to participate there.
But I see what you say, allowing them to contribute to other instances isn’t bad even if they don’t allow those instances to contribute on theirs.
That’s each instances choice to make I guess, and it’s part of the freedom of the platform.
beehaw would be within their rights to do it (effectively going read only to the outside, not currently possible but a requested feature is to have private or invite only communities), and if they are intending to be the clean family friendly option, it would be a valid choice to make if it were possible.
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
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many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
or youjo.love, for that matter
Read access should be managed on the user level, not the instance level imo. I don’t want to inherit some collective blacklist, I want my own.
For write access, it’s more complicated and I’m not sure what to think.
When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can’t be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance’s users agreed to that rule, probably because that’s what they wanted out of the instance.
Kbin (I’m on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.
The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.
Good point, I hadn’t considered that. But an instance can still strive to keep its blocklist as small as legally possible. This wouldn’t be a big issue in most liberal countries anyway I think.
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That’s a bit of a silly equivalence to make, beehaw admins even said it wasn’t a permanent or moral decision, they just need to figure out how to manage that from a moderation perspective, which is probably fair.
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I just wouldn’t take it so personally lol. Your number is probably in the middle of utter filth in the phone book (if those still exist)
we’re on what list now?
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i always browse defederated instances like a TV catalog, i’m glad there are instances like this where i can find some of the funniest instances on the right hand side, look at that there’s a troll cafe, a shitposter club, pooper social, and lmao gangstalking services, lots of piss and poop yes, and lotsa feminists, which i imagine are terfs cuz afaik that’s the only feminists that end up banned from lgbt friendly places
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a “safe space” anywhere except between your ears.
really just reads like excuses to being lazy.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
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Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don’t have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn’t want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that’s rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn’t large instances splitting off and defederating, it’s better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I’m on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn’t affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.
disagree - if there’s “trash” coming in then you know you’re not alone, just awash in detritus.
Either way you’re not usefully communicating, though.
You’ve got to strike a balance where you’re getting information just filtered enough you can usefully digest it, but no more.
i suppose that’s true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
That’s one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don’t like an instance you block them, if as an user you don’t like the instance you’re in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don’t have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.We’ll see, I guess. It’s very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I’m bummed they’re not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
I’m just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied…in a straight text based communication medium…?
That’s a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn’t say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don’t know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It’s a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The “invasive free-speech” instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you’re happy with.
Something I’m looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could’ve anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don’t think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I’m sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn’t that many.
liked beehaw but didn’t join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.
