From my understanding federation is having services be able to communicate with one another. If my understanding is wrong can you correct me or explain it further.

Also what is going on with defederating lemmy?

Thx

  • Because both those instances have open signups, so trolls troll Beehaw, get their accounts blocked, immediately create new accounts, then continue to troll Beehaw (and by troll I mean post unsavoury stuff that explicitly goes against Beehaws Safe Space goal)

    Still, de-federating is a big hammer that’s usually reserved for the extremist instances like you’ve found, so de-federating 2 mainstream general instances is an extreme move.

    It’s a very bad user experience for users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, especially since Beehaw has hosted many of popular Communities. So I can’t help but think it’s bad for the Lemmy migration as a whole to splinter users from Communities, even if it’s good for Beehaw to protect their own users (which is explicitly what they set out to do, and well within their right)

    Hopefully this is a one-time hiccup due to rapid expansion and lacking moderation tools, and not a sign of things to come. Beehaw did state in the announcement what it’s a temporary measure until better mod tools come along, I just hope more technical reasons to de-federate don’t keep coming up.

    I also can’t help but wonder if enabling downvotes on the instance would reduce the modding requirements drastically. Isn’t downvoting undesirable posts to oblivion essentially crowdsourcing moderation?

    • This is really what I worry about now. One of the top complaints from redditors was that “I’m afraid to choose an instance and then have them defederate from other ones I care about” I don’t think defederating whole instances is the right choice, personally. I do agree we need better mod tools to mod away groups of bad actors, but I don’t see anything wrong with perma bans either.

      • Unfortunately there really are only hammers at the moment. You can’t just defederate a community, but even if you could that wouldn’t help here.

        It’s not that the two instances were hosting objectionable content, it was that they had a slew of users come to Beehaw to try and disrupt the community, and continue to do things like ban evasion.