I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it’s way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn’t usually happen out of nowhere.

But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn’t choose it for myself. I’m just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.

I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Can’t it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don’t exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.

Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.

I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.

Thanks for the response. I didn’t realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that’s good to hear. I’m familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.

I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don’t mean to say you’re responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.

For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don’t have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.

However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.

My experiences with beehaw users have also been largely positive, but I don’t really use my alt that much, so I don’t have many encounters.

Thank you. I don’t necessarily think beehaw is going to die and I agree that it doesn’t need to get bigger.

But this was just my perspective as a sh.itjust.works user and admin that I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. SJW got cut off from beehaw users and communities soon after I joined Lemmy and it’s been bothering me ever since and this seemed like a good opportunity to communicate my perspective.

Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn’t been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren’t federated with each other.

You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You’ll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.

I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.

Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I don’t mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

I’m pretty sure it actually is significantly more dangerous. The front end of traditional pickups will still crumple and absorb a great deal of force. If the cybertruck is more rigid and the sharp edges have a potential to gash pedestrians on impact, that’s two factors that don’t apply to current pickups.

That’s a pretty stupid conclusion to draw. You have no idea why the hedge fund passed on the investment, and the only reason you conclude it’s because Bezos was bad at his job is because you personally don’t like him. And more to the point, because you want to get upvoted in this thread.

It’s just an amateurish, embarrassing argument. If you want to skewer billionaires there are plenty of legitimate gripes, but it’s self-evident that most billionaires are pretty damn good at their jobs, hence the success. Sure they’re also lucky and privileged, but there are tons of other people with the same privileges that accomplish nothing.

This meme is just pure brain rot tbh. Do better Lemmy 😤

Huh, TIL about youtube URLs. It’s also nice to know the origin of your username, looks like a pretty cool band

You’re a hateful person who’s making the world a worse place. Learn to empathize.

I have read them, and there is no evidence. You clearly don’t need evidence over there, anything a hexbear account says is the absolute truth, and anything from another server is absolute fascism. You guys don’t concern yourself with the details or nuances in life.

Let’s have a look at the defederation announcement about sh.itjust.works. Keep in mind this was less than 48 hours after you voluntarily voted to federate with us, expecting to abuse and overwhelm our userbase like you had already done to many smaller servers. Unfortunately, you didn’t realize that we were larger than you and thus less susceptible to being drowned out by the brigading, which led to a quick tactical retreat by your fearless leaders.

https://hexbear.net/post/504353

Firstly, opening up by calling us sh.itsfulla.chuds and sh.itholefor.nazis. Very mature and rational behavior from an admin 👏

Multiple instances of ableist and homophobic slurs directed at our users

I personally witnessed a hexbear user throwing a shit fit about people using the word “crazy”. Apparently that’s an ableist slur. Woopdee-doo

overwhelming litigiousness against even the most innocuous comments by our users, and just a general ethos of reactionary behavior. We’re done and out.

Lmao, I guess my point is self evident here. A lot of big words that convey absolutely no information about what specifically was objectionable about the behavior of sh.itjust.works users. I’d love if you could explain to me how “overwhelming litigiousness” and “a general ethos of reactionary behavior” are grounds for defederation 😂

I have also read the things that hexbear users have said about everybody else, and quite frankly they are the most nakedly racist and xenophobic comments on the entirety of Lemmy. Imagine having the gall to use the most hateful and dehumanizing language towards white people as a matter of principle, and then turn around and get all butthurt at a “racist” meme of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh. Try to rationalize that one for me, because I can’t seem to figure it out

Lmao Hexbear defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.blahaj.zone, in both cases with extensive theatrics and drama for essentially no concrete reason. Y’all literally defederated a server that is run by a trans woman as a safe space for gender diverse people because you claimed it was transphobic 😂

Yeah, you’re really going strong over there, no splintering whatsoever.

Kbin is doing pretty well, they are still holding on to about 6,000 MAUs. Lemmy still has around 32,000, for comparison. Lemmy peaked around 66,000 MAUs at the end of July, but a big chunk of that was probably alt accounts that have since gone dormant.

Kbin’s main developer had some major IRL events that coincided with the reddit exodus so he wasn’t really able to do much work on the code for a while. But now he is back, and another team has also made a fork of kbin called mbin.

https://kbin.social/u/ernest

Federation is still pretty janky with kbin, so I think that activity should pick up on both sides once we get some software updates and more intermingling of the kbin and Lemmy userbases.

OP is also spot on about this being the largest that a reddit alternative has ever gotten. I’m pretty sure alternatives such as discuit, squabble, tildes, etc have never even approached 10k MAUs, so we are already well past that. If not for the fact that this platform is federated, there would probably already be much more activity. However, the federated structure should become more and more useful as we grow larger, so it’s a worthy sacrifice even if it’s stunting activity for the time being.

He’s oldbaldgrumpy. Let him brag

Statistically, IQ follows a standard distribution, so the median and mean should be relatively close.

This thread got me thinking, do we have a replacement for r/outside on Lemmy? That sub was pretty entertaining at times