Hey kbinMeta.
Given the news that beehaw.org are defederating from two of the largest Lemmy instances due to issues with moderation, I thought it may be worth @ernest considering closing registrations here, for a while at least.
I've seen that a handful of other kbin instances have been spun up, however, kbin.social currently dwarfs their user numbers. kbin.social is currently sat at over 28,000 registered users, with the next highest, fedia.io sitting at around 3,000 users. I may be incorrect on this, but as far as I'm currently aware, @ernest is the only admin, I believe he may have mentioned that he's taken a couple of additional trusted users on board, but at this time, I can't find receipts to back that up, however, I am aware of the immense pressure that @ernest is in to keep things not only running smoothly, but also moving forward.
The workload overwhelmed me, and I couldn't read all your messages.
This is in relation to account deletion requests alone, and understandably, this explosion in popularity and userbase was not only unexpected for @ernest, but possibly also for the platform itself:
~~Apparently fedia.io have already disabled open resgistrations due to usercount~~, (although that may be unverified, as this post from the fedia.io admin doesn't suggest that, but still food for thought.). [This is not the case, they just aren't federating, as confirmed by Jerry, thanks! I think Jerry's comment is still very relevant to the topic at hand, however.]
Now, I've already seen a handful of comments denigrating beehaw.org from some of the defederated site users, as well as users local to kbin.social whose accounts were made after the defederation. This is more than likely to result in kbin.social also being defederated from beehaw.org, if not others. I completely understand that this is the nature of the fediverse, and that no one instance is going to be completely open with every other instance, however, I think it's worth considering that we "have our own house in order", namely in the shape of more site-wide moderation, instead of keeping the floodgates open for every reddit refugee or otherwise.
I'm well aware that many may disagree with this, but I think it's something to consider.
Edit: Edited title of post. I just want to clarify, I don't mean close registrations for good, just while things calm down a little bit / ernest has chance to get a solid moderation / admin team in place.
I may have missed the mark on my point in the main post to be fair; It's not about fearing defederation from beehaw.org, it's more about ensuring we don't get overran by people with ill-intentions before the dust has settled, and whilst the site doesn't have the manpower in place to keep things like that under control.
Currently there's nothing stopping someone from the communities beehaw has defederated with from signing up here and going on a fullblown hate campaign because they disagree with the ideals of the beehaw admins. Everywhere they go, those local instances are then looking at "[email protected]", and if nothing is done to prevent that, then it colours the rest of kbin.social users in a bad light. The more bad users you get, the more likely you are to experience widespread defederation, and lose out on a lot of what should make the concept of the fediverse great.
that's understandable, though I think the fear is unwarranted. lemmy users want to stay on lemmy. they don't want to come to kbin (even to troll). and I think the few that might end up here will just be drowned out by good faith kbinauts. I think it's already the case that we are getting a good image and reputation in the fediverse.
naturally open signups means that all types will come here. but as I said, that's kinda what makes kbin kbin. we're also federated with "problematic instances" like lemmygrad. if someone has an issue with kbin being open to everyone, then they will naturally block us no matter what we do.
beehaw is just that: I think they'll end up defederating from many instances, not just the two they did yesterday. because what they want is fundamentally opposite to the idea of federation.
lemmyworld and sh.itjust.works users are content with the beehaw block because in their eyes, beehaw sucks. why would they want to participate in those communities? lemmyworld isn't closing their signups just to try and get on beehaw's good side again; despite their current reputation in the fediverse.
I think the bigger issue for kbin isn't necessarily whether or not other instances "like us", but rather whether or not we as an instance can maintain the "kbin culture" of civil discourse, neutrality, helpfulness, etc. I think that spirit and culture is far more important than whether or not a few bad apples start getting other instances wanting to defederate.
ultimately, I'm not worried about it. kbin isn't exactly a large instance (we got the "literally who" treatment from beehaw lol). so I don't think one or two people will really be an issue even if there's a full "beehaw hater" who comes on here to troll them. because one user can simply be blocked by beehaw. defederation resulted because they felt there was too much coming from lemmyworld and sh.itjust.works. And that's not due to a few bad apples, but a culture clash as a whole.
Idk if you've interacted with those sh.itjust.works guys, but it's obvious to me why beehaw blocked them. Their culture is just completely at odds with beehaw. Whereas kbin culture I believe is not. If a large amount of "beehaw haters" start flooding kbin and changing the culture to be one of toxicity and vitriol, then I do think we'd start having a problem. Otherwise I don't see it as an issue.
Given the much higher number of Lemmy instances, you may well be 100% correct on that, that is, even trolls may just decide to 'stick with what they know' and continue to use a Lemmy based instance.
Also correct, however, I understand that if a post is local to kbin.social, and had comments from lemmy.world users, in addition to kbin.social users, and a beehaw.org use came to the post, they wouldn't see any of the comments from the defederated users. That is to say, so long as one instance doesn't federate with another, they will never see posts from that instance, regardless of where they are.
I'm not saying that won't still prevent people defederating with kbin.social purely because we're open / federate with another community they specifically defederated from, but there's less reason to if kbin.social maintains a quality userbase.
Another agreement from me here, however, the point of this post is to start a discussion around whether or not we can prevent being overwhelmed with bad apples too early on in the platforms lifespan (although I appreciate we've already addressed this above).
As has been said, at this point, it's entirely up to @ernest, but I think it's worth looking at potentially taking a couple more people on to assist with the moderation side of things.
Hi, here on a Lemmy account! This post showed in my All feed, so it looks like k.bin and Lemmy are starting to federate more (which I think is great).
I think at this point, even were k.bin signups to be closed, defederation is going to be one of the few ways to avoid bad actors spilling from somewhere. I hope that doesn't happen, but if cultures from Lemmy and k.bin end up different, maybe a way to silo what you see to only your service can be found.
our admin hasn't said anything, but I think the ethos here is "federate with everyone". So if defederation happens, it'll be someone else blocking kbin, not the other way around. We still federate with lemmygrad, for instance, despite many blocking them.