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?

  • users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.

    Didn’t have to be an essay, it just had to be something that answered the 3 questions it asked about why you want to join beehaw.

    • Precisely. I think the “write an essay” has become kind of a meme among non-Beeple about Beehaw at this point; I first saw it on Reddit a couple months ago, kept seeing it on and off, and just today saw it again.

      It was also in part what made me join: when I saw what it was all about, I was like “so… people who believe that thinking before answering is too much effort, won’t be here… nice…” 😄

    • The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway. Either it’s too much to ask of them to write a couple of sentences, or they haven’t even bothered to look and inform themselves before spitting their hot take. Neither personality is desirable lol

      • The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway.

        The TLDR behavior and won’t click offsite links and references and want a constant stream of tiny little ideas. There was a time when Reddit wasn’t like that and it became the culture of TLDR and downvote-disagree.

        Reddit could have single-handedly taken on clickbait in 2014 or earlier by people replacing news headlines with sincere earnest descriptions. But the clickbait became what people swam in.