Beehaw considering Leaving Lemmy and the Fediverse
Beehaw considering Leaving Lemmy and the Fediverse
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.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is actually the exact reason I haven’t tried to stand up an instance. I don’t want to mirror the content.
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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.
You pose a good question. Here are a couple reasons:
- Rust is hard language for people to develop with.
- There are problems extending beyond moderation that need addressing, such as database management, as admin alyaza put it:
The problems with databases are almost too numerous to talk about and even Lemmy’s most ardent supporters recognize this as the biggest issue with the software currently.
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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.
Not quite. When you are on a non federated community, with accounts that require approval, the ability to ban trouble makers solves most things, and doesn't leave them with an easy way back in.
Moderation requirements on lemmy are very different though, because federation introduces communities and users from instances that have different rules.
I thought you can turn off federation.
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.
If this happens, we will lose a good chunk of the lemmy fediverse
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.
I feel a major problem was just people's hurry to recreate a quantity of communities. I was seeing a number of sports teams communities being created, when a single community for the entire league would be a better call. Then multiply that by those same communities being created in multiple servers, and it gets out of hand.
These do seem solvable though, even just letting community admins "peer" with similar communities in other servers could solve this problem.
I'm not sure that's a property of the fediverse. You'd have that same issue with similarly themed subreddits for example. And 99.99% of subreddits were also dead spaces.
I believe it's just as simple as the quantity of users, and has nothing to do with federated or not.
What an odd bunch.
Does Lemmy support account migrating? I know Mastodon can do it, but wouldn't know if Lemmy does.
Lemmy Migrate works great for at least syncing subscriptions, but I think I read somewhere that it doesn't work if the instances don't federate together. Lemmy unfortunately doesn't support actual migration of history and whatnot.
They have some valid complaints but bothowdy do they sound like they are whining quite a bit.
Good Riddance. They wanted a safe space, they now have their safe space. Everyone's happy.
What do you mean by this? I havent explored that instance
They seem to feel aggrieved by beehaw, which existed long before they discovered lemmy, and its sanitized moderation style. It’s just a safe space instance full of affable people. There’s really nothing else to it. I honestly have no clue why they’re upset about internet hippies.