I came over here to avoid the drama and start fresh. But somehow there is drama going on between something called beehaw and lemmy.world? What are instances? Are they servers? What or who is being defederated? Somehow I just joined but I'm shadowbanned cuz I registered on lemmy.world?

The text box bugs out and trying to type in a new line jumps to some random point in the previous line in Jerboa? Kinda wonky

I dunno I hope all this shit gets sorted out cuz I wanna settle so I hope all involved parties sort out this bs

[–] AlmightySnoo 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Beehaw basically decided that some instances, including ours, are too unsafe for them and they wanted to preserve the "safest Lemmy instance on the internet" title so they needed this drama.

The thing though is that it's been weeks and most lemmings are pretty much unaffected by that, much larger communities have grown since then on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml (and also other specialized instances like programming.dev) and that drama is pretty much irrelevant today and just a historical hiccup and beehaw is just a small epsilon in the lemmyverse right now.

tl;dr: it pretty much doesn't affect you today, you can safely ignore beehaw's existence, or if you insist you can create your account in an instance that is still (at least for now) federated with beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Unsafe isn't the right way to put it. Lemmy, being so new, has limited admin tools, especially for cross instance interactions. They saw an unusually high number of bad posts from people in the biggest instances, which is frankly expected for being the biggest open instances. Since they didn't have a better way to deal with people not from their instance, they decided to just defederate from the biggest instances for now.

My understanding is that they don't like that "solution" and intend to refederate once there's better admin tools. They want to focus on providing a safe space and the it's not that the instances they blocked are unsafe, but that the people from those instances make it hard for beehaw to provide their desired safe space for their local instances. They don't want to change other instances. They just want to make their own communities higher quality.

Personally, I purposefully chose an instance that beehaw hasn't defederated cause their communities are very good. It's a shame they aren't accessible to most of the threadiverse. I personally think their solution was too extreme, but I can empathize with how difficult it must be to moderate massive communities with very limited tooling.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What are instances? Are they servers?

Yes, each instance hosts differents communities, like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, but through federation they are able to communicate between each other. For their respective users, that means to be able to read, comment, post and vote in every community inside their instances.

But somehow there is drama going on between something called beehaw and lemmy.world?

Not really dramatic, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have a simple registration process, which means it can be very easy to sign up bots, beehaw prefers a more rigid sign up process, where they can better curate their community.

What or who is being defederated?

Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works until all of them have better mod tools to deal with the sudden influx of users. Defederated means that users between them can't read new comments and posts, and vote in the other community, leaving only the post and comment copies that existed before the defederation.

Somehow I just joined but I'm shadowbanned cuz I registered on lemmy.world?

Servers were overloaded, the usual growing pains in a new plataform.

The text box bugs out and trying to type in a new line jumps to some random point in the previous line in Jerboa? Kinda wonky

I recommend Liftoff and wefwef instead. Jerboa is the Lemmy's creators side project, so it isn't their primary focus. wefwef is a progressive web app (PWA) so you might not find it the play/app store.

[–] Razgriz 3 points 2 years ago

Appreciate the breakdown. I'll definitely try those other apps and see which one is the smoothest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Beehaw is just... doing their own thing. They even removed down votes. Like Tildes, they have a specific vision of community and are going against the grain to cultivate it.

I can't say that I agree with Beehaw's direction and decision to defederate. But that's a feature of both Lemmy and Beehaw's vision of community. Some vocal minority of people are taking it too seriously because they are treating Lemmy as normal social media and perceiving this all as slights. We don't need to be tribalistic. And, if one does want to be tribalistic, they are free to go try and join one of the cut-off tribalistic instances like Beehaw. I have an account there and... it does feel different. Lemmy in general is calmer and more prone to high quality interactions. Beehaw is, too. But Beehaw is the "this is a Christian Minecraft server!!" of Lemmy at the moment.

[–] sorenant 3 points 2 years ago

I think it would be healthier if people stopped treating Lemmy as 1:1 Reddit replacement and instead as a local bbs with Reddit-like interface that can, not will, connect to other bbs using the same infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Indeed. Beehaw is like a friendly cultivated forum site, that wants to let its users go out and interact with other similar forum sites. I think it's understandable that to create that curated experience they defederate from servers they think would harm it, every instance has its own approach to it. The instance I'm on, VLemmy, recently held a vote and decided to not defederate even with really shitty instances, instead opting to let users curate their own experience. To each their own, that's one of the great things about the decentralization of the Lemmy protocol, every server can do its own thing and users can join whichever they would like or host their own.

[–] Saneless 2 points 2 years ago

I just think of beehaw as its own individual site that happens to use Lemmy.

Like when all the different sites all had the same forum software, but it's not like they were connected or anything. Don't even think they could be connected.

Lemmy is just a convenient platform for them.

And that's fine. They have their advantages of a more private platform but the disadvantages of it never being as busy or popular as it would be while federated

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Don't worry too much about such drama. This is all super new and still sorting itself out. Managing the huge amount of new users is a gigantic task for the admins of the big instances and of course also for the moderators here.

Everything is new and not "broken in" yet. Mod tools need to improve, captchas are not always enabled, ... The list is long but development is insanely fast right now.

I am quite excited about what will happen for the next month, because in the last 2 weeks things have changed quickly, the community grew and I could FEEL it getting bigger and better here!