(Posting to lemmy.world seems to be disabled so I’m posting this here instead.)
This inconsistency has been bothering me, so I went poking around in their support community, and the best I could find was a statement saying they had reached out to the admins of both. Apparently they expected @ruud@lemmy.world to reply to something that didn’t seem like a question as indicated by his response in Beehaw Support. As such, they claim to have no roadmap to eventually refederate with lemmy.world.
I added a reply from another instance, but I’m guessing I won’t receive a reponse so if anyone knows, I would like to better understand the issue. It’s quite annoying feeling like I’m missing out, especially when I’m seeing inflammatory overly generalized statements from kbin.social users about how lemmy.world deserved to be defederated over in this post on lemmy.ml.
I know that many people don’t like their defederation decision but I think they did it in good faith. And they did state they want to refederate with the two instances once the mod tools are in place.
For kbin, they did mention the reasoning behind.
To be clear there are problematic users on nearly every instance. I’ve had to moderate quite a few kbin users, but it’s not standing out from the pack as a particularly problematic place as of this moment.
As for lemmy.ml, I have a stupid theory that since the signup is closed, those spammers cannot get accounts over there.
Didn’t think I’d vitness such drama in my first week on lemmy. My popcorn is ready.
I read that there were some people with accounts at lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works that went into their communities and were rude, inflammatory, and not following their rules so I think it’s more of a ‘punishing the many for the actions of the few’ situation. Maybe they were getting overrun, maybe there were a ton of rule breakers, or maybe they just didn’t want to deal with the huge surge of users. Hard to say.
I haven’t been in their communities so I don’t know if maybe they have much more strict rules that people weren’t following or what. Or maybe people were bringing a vibe they weren’t fond of - they may have that insular community feel and maybe too many people moved into their neighborhood that threw off their block parties, I don’t know. I personally don’t feel the loss because I’m not in their communities but I do feel kinda sad that someone federated with both might see people commenting the exact same thing but they can’t see each other so they can’t just interact with each other.
They have strict rules.
…Not to say they’re unreasonable rules.Yeah, they can definitely have their rules and it’s on everyone who steps over there to follow them for sure. They can run their instance and communities however they want, that’s the beauty of this whole system. It’s just unfortunate that they blocked a couple general population instances without specifically contrary rules and beliefs because a couple people were being jerks (if that’s what’s been happening).
Unpopular opinion but I don’t think refederation with beehaw.org should be on the table. They loved the concept of federation when they needed users, and then once they’ve grown enough they said okay now we’re gonna be a closed island and the other peasants need to rise to our standards before we refederate with them. The moderation excuse is obviously not sincere as users could have easily volunteered to moderate.
No matter how fancy their writing is (and there was indeed lots of it, why try too hard to justify the decision?), I think the trust has been broken. Why would I comment on their threads ever again and risk having my content “locked” in their instance if they go on another ego trip and defederate again?
I just want to know why only some of the large communities were hit. My best guess so far from memory is lemmy.ml was struggling to stay online and federated during that time, and kbin.social had their Cloudflare DDOS protection enabled breaking federation so maybe they were not an immediate concern on the day the announcement was made. I’ve no clue why they have not since defederated with lemmy.ml and kbin.social since both are currently federating with everyone.
As far as refederating with Beehaw.org goes, lemmy.world is only defederated with one unrelated instance so we never actually stopped federating with them. It’s just a one way street stuck in time since we get no new content.
@Jessica@lemmy.world I noticed your comment in one of the threads linked and I share your sentiment.
Furthermore, if I look over at beehaw’s modlog, I see only five (5) moderator actions against lemmy.world users and one community removal.
Did they really defederate because they had five users to moderate? Does anyone see something I’m missing in the log?
Edit: woke up a bit more and realized you are OP so simplified my comment
That is some damning evidence that they really did defederate over effectively nothing. I don’t quite understand how the modlog works or how to filter it, so I’m glad you were able to research that and confirm because I was curious if there were a lot of records in there leading up to the defederation.
TBH, as I haven’t spun up my own instance to see what admins can do, I can’t say for sure if what I see is the whole record.
That said, the modlog is described in the docs as being there to provide transparency, so at face value, it seems that five people may have been all it took.
I also haven’t looked closely into what “purged a user” means vs the other more transparent actions on the modlog, so I have to say, “take all these comments with a grain of salt.” I’m still learning about lemmy as a platform.
I may be mistaken, but from what I gather the modlog is…Kind of a mess. It appears to aggregate the admin/mod actions of admins & mods across instances & communities, and doesn’t allow for filtering to the specific instance or community.
You can see this if you come across someone that’s been banned in a different instance but made a new account in another with the same name by filtering the modlog by username (albeit that can be finicky, like a lot of things atm).
That makes sense that it’s not necessarily what it first seems.
Not sure about the situation with Lemmy.ml other than they’ve been linked longer than any of the newer instances (so maybe have a better sense for how the admins/mods there are willing to handle things, but with Kbin.social it wasn’t being federated for awhile as they worked on just getting the instance more fully online (a testament to how new-ish its software is, I think).
So I think they simply had more experience and trust that Lemmy.ml would handle things on their end, and Kbin.social simply wasn’t being federated just yet when they made their decision.
So why isn’t kbin.social defederated now? They are federated, open, and growing. The only sin that lemmy.world had was it was reliable.
