This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

  •  abhibeckert   ( @abhibeckert@beehaw.org ) 
    9•11 months ago

    I’m not jumping on you - I’m just pointing out lemmy.world isn’t a total write off. There are about 20k monthly active users on that instance and about 20k of those people are polite, reasonable people who post interesting content.

    With any large community like that there’s always going to be some people who’re problematic, but either the moderators on lemmy.world are deleting them before I see them, or else it’s happening on communities I don’t subscribe to (probably a mix of both).

    I think Beehaw should re-federate lemmy.world as soon as the moderation tools are better. In particular the cross-instance moderation issues should be sorted out. The key to a functioning fediverse is to ensure that everyone across instances can work together to tackle bad content. Many hands make light work.

    I don’t really care about “growth”. Lemmy is a community not a corporation. What I care about is when someone starts an interesting discussion, are there “enough” people who take part in that discussion? I see threads on Beehaw (and even on Lemmy.World) that get zero replies. That sucks.