Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s just down to Lemmy not having good enough mod tools yet. Beehaw is a carefully curated walled garden instance that hosts some high quality communities; they are availing themselves of the only real tool they have to curb an influx of bad actors from other instances.
Here’s hoping its temporary. The admin team here at sh.itjust.works clearly operates in good faith.
but why bother? they can still enter from any of the thousands of other instances that allow free registration. if they want to troll, they are still able to do that.
I’m not an admin, so I’m partially paraphrasing and partially speculating, but my understanding is that we’re still in the whack-a-mole phase of lemmy moderation due to the immaturity of the platform and the tooling surrounding it. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world were the most visible issues because they grew VERY quickly and have no barriers to registration - they became big enough and some users problematic enough to warrant a full, well-articulated post from the Beehaw admins regarding the defederation.
Take a look at the massive list of blocked instances on beehaw.org/instances and you’ll see that the level of care and attention regarding this specific defederation makes this situation fairly unique. Smaller instances probably just get banned near immediately. Sucks that the end result is for us to be lumped in with racists and the like, but it looks like all involved parties expect this to be resolved eventually.
Like I said, it’s just a matter of tooling. Our admins are doing an excellent job, considering. I know this because I watch the bullshit I report get dealt with in near real time. I don’t envy the work they’re putting in.
They have stated as much, and are open to refederating once the mod tools can handle the influx of people joining instances with open sign-ups. Side effect of the reddit refugee crisis.