We still federate, but god knows how long that will last. They have defederated nearly 400 instances and they sound lile theyre losing the plot

  • clara
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    2 years ago

    Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out.

    and this is the issue with beehaw isn’t it, i’m not judging them wanting to carve out a vetted/secure and controlled space, it’s entirely understandable given their audience and purpose, but then why are you building such a community on federated software? that sounds impossible! part of the point of federation is to allow cross-talk from other spaces and communities. if you’re going to defederate and wall off from 400 instances (as OP claims) then beehaw should transition to vanilla forum software, this would save themselves all the headache.

    all the best to them ❤️

    • scrchngwsl
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      2 years ago

      Same as you, I can neither agree nor disagree with this, and it is of course their choice who they federate with – that’s part of the point of this thing, you can choose who to federate with. It is really interesting to see how lemmy develops and how communities use it to handcraft the sort of online space they want.

      It does seem like their immediate goals would be better served with a forum, but I also see why a platform-agnositic approach using ActivityPub and federation makes sense for them over the long run, as there are surely plenty of users on Mastodon for example that they would want to interact with and incude in the safe space they’re creating.

      The learning for me I think is that when I reply to posts on other instances that are federated onto our instance, I should be mindful of that instance, its culture and its rules. I’m walking into a room and talking to people in that room, so I should read the room first. Again, it will be interesting to see how the culture on lemmy plays out, and whether “reading the room” becomes a core part of how people use federated software.

    • Ted Ward@toot.wales
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      2 years ago

      @clara @theory

      After reading some of the “essays” they have on the about the community it seems they want there own site/community. Maybe a forum/reddit/discord server would suit what they want better than a federated place.

      To me it seems they just looked for somewhere they could achieve what they wanted (ie reddit copy) but not understood the federated part of the tech.

      • mark
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        2 years ago

        I don’t think it is what the mods want. They would rather be open, but not at the cost of being unable to keep on top of moderation. Also, the software works perfectly well as a closed forum. And maybe that suits beehaw better.

        This is a feature of federated communities, there is no one source of who’s in and who’s out. That is the job of each instance. But if an instance does not control its users then it will lose reputation and be excluded from certain spaces.

        Therefore, we are all responsible for the reputation of our own instance.