A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
Honestly, reading the second post I feel for them. Seems like the main issues are all technical.
The issue about a mod removing an image from the posting server and it not being removed on other servers is very concerning. That means that any instance needs to moderate the same content again on top of the moderation that was already done by the host instance.
That type of duplication of effort is strange and it also means that illegal images could be propagated throughout the instances when they could have been stopped at the front door.
I always felt the fediverse is designed in a very awkward way… the way all the content needs to be mirrored, not only does it make it hard to update / modify / delete content, but also it makes it so other instances have to host content from all the other instances they want their users to access…
Not only is that redundant and requiring a lot more resources from the instances, but it also means that if an instance you federate with is hosting content you don’t want (let’s say… ch*ld pr0n) then your instance might end up HOSTING (ie.activelly propagating) that content… if I hosted my own instance I wouldn’t want to federate at all out of fear of legal implications and I’d be constantly paranoid about possibly facilitating illegal stuff like that without even noticing…
Imho, a decentralized system in which content providers are separate from the user account providers would make more sense in my mind. Then the content providers can have full control over what they are hosting and also control over what user accounts (or whole account providers) are banned from posting / allowed to post. And it still gives users the freedom to navigate across different content providers seamlessly with the same account and interact with multiple content providers, sort of like with the fediverse, without having to login to each content provider.
Yeah. The Reddit migration, small at it was, brought an order of magnitude more people to the platform, and it has shown Lemmy is not ready for prime time. It is also showing that the devs may not be the best at leading this kind of development effort due to inexperience.
Relooking at the idea of the fedeverse may be needed, and the group at Beehaw seem knowledgeable enough on how a Reddit like system should work that they could probably do a better job designing one.
The fediverse model is just pointless because it offers a stupid amount of redundancy and replication of communities. Why should literally anybody be able to come and spin up an instance and flood my feed with a new bevy of 1 subscriber 1 viewer communities? They didn’t like the moderation strategy on the other server? Cool, let’s give them carte blanche to just make another new community with blackjack and hookers and the 10 people who also disagreed with policies of basic decency.
It’s just annoying. One day you’re like “oh I’ve finally purged my feed of the thing I don’t like” and then all of a sudden a new instance spins up and there’s 20 new communities for the exact same shit that they have on literally every other server.
At least reddit is one and done. I don’t have to filter out a football team five times because five different servers have five different communities for the one team.
I get why a decentralized model was created; we’ve seen issues pop up with Reddit due to a centralization of power. However, this current implementation of a decentralized system is showing major problems at a fraction of the scale Reddit showed and the devs seem incapable of enacting meaningful change to fix this.
You won’t see the posts to the small communities on the new instance unless one of your users manually finds them and subscribes to them.
Since the beginning, I expected Beehaw to move to an unfederated software. They wanted a system where they could vouch for every user and comment, and even with a list of allowed instances, there was (and is) not enough control they can do to keep it to their standards.
Personally I think federation is overrated, and that the server > community model Lemmy adopted is not ideal. I used to think federation was the solution to Reddit, and that being able to post on disparate forums with one account was the way to go. I still see benefits to it, but I don’t think it’s right for every community.
Ultimately all federation has done is create a bunch of empty spaces.
It’s cool in theory for everybody to be able to host and join but ultimately all that it’s done is create these void-like dead communities. More and more frequently I’ve been seeing people attempt to redirect from the dead zones into more active communities, but even “active” is pretty relative on the fediverse.
I feel like every time I click on some new community I don’t want to deal with (usually sports) it’s always on some new domain with 1 subscriber and 2 viewers. It’s not even exclusive to sports, it’s basically just all the communities I generally see outside of the major established servers.
I just don’t get the appeal for federation. I like it here because the community is small enough to not have succumbed to the major general toxicity that pervades every online platform eventually when it reaches massive sizes. I like the niche tech discussions - this is the same vibe reddit used to have before the digg migration. There are just a lot of dead, redundant spaces across the entire fediverse and it the decentralization makes it worse.
The point of federation is that you don’t have one central entity that controls the whole thing and can do whatever they want. Like Reddit.
The emptiness is due to the number of users instead of federation. There just aren’t enough people creating content to sustain smaller communities.
I don’t think more users would fill out more of the same communities. There needs to be some kind of central way of syncing topics together so you don’t literally have fifteen of the same community over fifteen different servers. It’s not necessary, and at best it fragments the conversation because nobody knows where to go unless they default to the larger instances.
This is the biggest issue. So many of the same communities spread across the different servers.
What an odd bunch.
Yeah. I mean it’s a topic that will affect a lot of people, but the changes are likely months away. Beehaw doesn’t have a platform to switch to overnight anyway, it would need some work.
That said it’s good to get this conversation out in the open early as to hopefully spur Lemmy development to address issues we’re running into and help improve the Fediverse model overall.
What I don’t get is that they’d probably need to create their own platform. Their main issue is about mod tools, so they’d need to create their own mod tools. Why not just add those to Lemmy? It’s open source. If they’re capable of creating their own platform, they’re capable of adding what they need to Lemmy.
