Not at all. They’ve been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.
So until moderation tools improve, their options are
Give up their safety focus. We can assume that’s not going to happen
Find more admins, which is easier said than done, because at this point in time, one of the lacking moderation features is the ability to add instance moderators. Right now, the only instance elevated role is admin. You have to be able to trust the new admin with the keys to everything.
Defederate with instances that threaten their high value on community safety
My point is, there wasn’t really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.
I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That’s the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it’ll be confusing for new users though who aren’t used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.
The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw’s communities who weren’t on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they’ve been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.
Everything you’ve said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.
This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren’t clear to a lot of their new members
It’s the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don’t want to federate with you, and that that’s okay. This is different from the usual ‘freeze peach’ stuff, this is just communities saying ‘we don’t want to hear you’.
Seems they’re just discovering what being “federated” actually means.
Not at all. They’ve been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.
So until moderation tools improve, their options are
My point is, there wasn’t really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.
I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That’s the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it’ll be confusing for new users though who aren’t used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.
The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw’s communities who weren’t on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they’ve been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.
Everything you’ve said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.
This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren’t clear to a lot of their new members
@ada Egad. Yeah. I’d be very worried if someone messaged me saying pls be --moderator-- er admin. I’d be worried.
@0485919158191 @fubo @TiffyBelle
It’s the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don’t want to federate with you, and that that’s okay. This is different from the usual ‘freeze peach’ stuff, this is just communities saying ‘we don’t want to hear you’.
Especially when by all accounts they only had 4 admin/mods running all of their communities…