@sarmale exactly. I saw on r/RedditAlternatives that someone created a Lemmy instance that was defederated from everyone - so it is possible to turn your Lemmy server into a walled garden. Maybe an allowlist would make for a better middle ground.
We simply need a lot more moderation tools than the current set of lemmy devs are willing to create, and many of them see some of the requests as frivolous or not in line with their personal beliefs on how the website mechanics should work. There’s also a metric ton of bugs, potential legal issues with how the platform deals with federation and malicious and abhorrent material, and the issue of the code of choice this website runs on not being a particularly popular or easy to pick up coding language meaning less access to talent to fix or work on new things. We’ve been talking about potentially moving platforms for some time now and with time there are just more discoveries of new issues.
I will be honest with you, I do not think that it would be a good use of your time. This has been unfolding for a long time and its clear that there are both coding and ideological issues with lemmy as a platform (there’s plenty of discussions of this which have unfolded in the chat and beehaw support communities which I would suggest reading up on). However, if you are committed to making lemmy as a whole a better place, here’s a truncated list of some of the still existing issues:
There are not enough federation options to deal effectively with current problems, at minimum:
One-way federation to protect our site culture
Exemption from all feed & media reject to handle pornography
Purging posts and comments does not purge associated images
Reports are not sent to the right places (example: we don’t get reports about our users’ off-instance activity and reports are not sent to moderators which are off-instance)
The modlog does not work in a chronological fashion and does not allow to filter actions by instance or per community
Moderators are exposed to graphic images because a banned user’s description is still visible
If you are a mod of a community, and you get banned from that community you mod, you can still take mod actions
If you get site-banned from an instance and you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from your instance can see and interact with your posts
I do hope we stay federated, while I get that moderation is a pain for you Admins and better tools need to be developed, I think you all have been doing a very good job. Nearly all my interactions with the wider fedeverse we interact with have been positive or neutral, and I think it would be rather dead and boring here if it was just us. It’s nice to have diverse subscription feed where I can find posts on more than just the few communities here, especially slrpnk, Bajhaj, lemmy.ca, and midwest.social
When the idea of beehaw leaving the fediverse comes up I see a few users from outside of beehaw get pretty upset about it. I wonder if this is some kind of FOMO reaction? Just food for thought.
I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we’d also be a lot slower, and I’d be checking it a lot less.
Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It’s leftist, but it’s also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.
Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn’t ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y’all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.
It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of… meh.
But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don’t get that many posts, so it’s nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It’d definitely be a bummer to lose that.
Anyway, I think you’re much closer to your goal than you might see while you’re on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it’s an oasis.
I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.
There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed
Without substantial growth after being cut off from the activity of the fediverse, Beehaw would not be large enough to stave off serious atrophy. The lemmy/kbin end of the fediverse is already very slow to begin with.
Beehaw was around much before the current “population explosion” of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn’t have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn’t a requisite for sites to thrive.
I’m on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it’s certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it’s got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more “volume” to be a nice place to be.
I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.
We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.
These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.
I think the worry is less about growth, and more about dying out. Too much external input can drown out the local conversation, but also too little external input can put too much pressure on the members to generate content, leading to burnout and also killing conversations.
It’s a precarious balance between “so much that it gets out of control” and “so little that there is nothing left out”.
The behavioral expectations of Beehaw are a lot like those of tildes.net, where I’m also a member. Although I thoroughly enjoy the conversations there, I also long for other types of content, content available in the fediverse. And Beehaw is, for me, the perfect place to access that content. Beehaw has a great community that generates good content and conversations, but it also allows me to browse other stuff from ‘all’ and interact with different people. I enjoy reading what other people think, even if they have a way of communicating that doesn’t jive all that well with the rest of Beehaw.
What I can imagine is that moderating Beehaw within the context of the fediverse is a pain in the ass. The burden on the admin and moderator team must be a lot bigger than if Beehaw was on its own.
Has anybody had a conversation about implementing non-federated communities or is that even a possibility with activitypub? I would love to have native beehaw communities that are only accessible by logged-in beehaw users, but still retain federation for some of my more niche communities that may not have a large enough audience here.
Although I could very easily just maintain my old account on a fediverse server alongside my beehaw account if beehaw ventures off into an entirely new direction.
When I read about the beehaw vision a few days ago, I fell in love, so I’m here for whatever y’all decide.
there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: lemmy.ml/comment/7026804
And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.
And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).
I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.
As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.
I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward
This is a somewhat uncomfortable ellipsis for me. Can you be more specific about the emerging consensus? Last time I asked this question it went ignored.
Where are these discussions happening? On the beehaw Lemmy or elsewhere?
I only saw one thread alluding to this posted by a beehaw admin on Lemmy.ml.
I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. In one hand you have stagnancy and in the other pure chaos. I don’t envy you for having to tackle issues like this because there is no perfect solution, but I would encourage you to find a balance. Balance is a prerequisite to longevity.
You would not have enjoyed holiday dinners at my house. While my parents were good people, you can’t pick your relatives. We had the infamous Uncle Tom and Aunt Janet, who would swallow anything and everything you had in the bathroom medicine cabinet, even if it landed them in the emergency room later. And Grandma, a devout catholic that spent every Sunday at church learning how to love thy neighbor, who would go on long cuss ridden tirades insulting and slurring on minorities. And then there was Uncle Pete, who was thrown out of Bob Evans on Easter Sunday for announcing to the entire dining room that ‘He could puke better than this sausage gravy’. I do actually miss Uncle Pete. He did have a hell of a way of getting his point across, and that sausage gravy was totally bunk.
While thinking about it all still raises my blood pressure even 40 years later, those moments brought their behaviors from my subconscious to my conscious where I could take notice of it. It did empower me to actively NOT be like that. I saw first-hand several of my future potential selves and chose to take a higher road. I find a bit of comfort in that. I wonder if I wasn’t exposed to those behaviors from a third person perspective, would I have been able to avoid them.
Oh, and sorry about dropping that bomb the other day. I was in a rare mood. I removed it as you rightfully requested of me. In my defense, I used the word appropriately, but I totally understand.
You seem like a decent enough fellow. Best of luck.
I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. …The one where the crew execute the clones that Planet A were making of them to make up for their lack of genetic diversity, and forced them to marry into Planet Ireland instead?
I would prefer if Beehaw remained federated, but, as it is, I understand that the options of software for a platform like Beehaw on the fediverse are lacking on many aspect and started something new requires time,knowledge, and money.
Got a dogshit performance review because I did not conform to the pointless metrics we’re judged against, like ‘Positivity’ and ‘Responsiveness’ (because I didn’t smile every day and I don’t answer teams messages after hours.) I hate this job. Fuck capitalism.
Hang in there OP, I left the company I worked for early last year for reasons like that. Sure isn’t the easiest thing to do (x-gen here) but I feel like it’s always ^tm^ a good solution when your job sucks(the soul out of you).
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