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.
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.
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.
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.
It wasn’t set up to be decentralized power though. The structure was digital fiefdoms with admins and mods on an instance with power over their local communities… and yet difficult to censor content that was posted into it. But you can still get banned from a community or an instance or have an instance get defederated.
The structure doesn’t really solve any of the problems of centralization of power (as shown with Lemmy.world) - its to make it hard to shut down what someone wants to say on some instance’s community if the admin and mods are ok with it. And even if the instance you are on defederates and blocks them, they’re still there and people can sign up there and participate there.
This is Reddit with censorship resistance (no way to completely kick off /r/the_donald from Lemmy if they can stand up their own server) - not reddit with decentralized power.
It is decentralized in that there isn’t one group of admins, but a set of them across the platform who can run their instances as they see fit.
And you can effectively kick off an instance from Lemmy by mass defederation.
I don’t see that as a federation issue, it’s a moderation one. It’s on the admins to bring something new / niche to the table.