What happened?
https://sh.itjust.works/post/107627
Basically, Beehaw defederated from some newer instances. Partially because some people were being shitheads, but for other understandable reasons as well.
The moral of the story is, it’s ok to be a sh.it.head, it’s not ok to be a shithead. Not the same.
hey, I have been here awhile, and while I am not 100% sure the exact issue that triggered this, what I can tell you is generaly the beehaw admin team has shown themselves not to be the most trust worthy team when it comes to lemmy instances, so I would take their story with a grain of salt
It’s lousy being blocked by an entire section of the site and now labelled a bigot because some trolls made their accounts on the same instance as me.
Agreed, it sucks. But their admins are talking to our admins, and so far ours seem like they have their heads screwed on pretty well, so I’m sure it’ll only be for a short time.
Oust the shitheads, promote the stand-up sh.it.heads, I say.
To be honest I had no idea that people from this instance were doing it until one troll post bragging about getting us banned from Beehaw and explained how he did it, along with a comic book supervillian diatribe about how the Fediverse isn’t safe and long live Reddit.
The internet was a mistake
just a heads up, in the past beehaw has accused other instances of brigadding, and being bigots over disagreements that had nothing to do with the such (I know that becuase that was story 3 and 4 respectivly) there is a decent chance that they have done the blocking over a difrent reason (like to exert a level of control) and then back justified. I will be really honest, do not take the beehaw admins word at face value for anything
The hell, lol… do you have a link to that post?
I saw the same post the comment above is referring to and their description is accurate. And I also saw the offending post they put on beehaw. Some low effort troll homophobic thing. Their posts on both beehaw and sh.itjust.works were both quickly down voted and removed I think, because I couldn’t find either again shortly after I first saw it.
Damn… Yeah, to be honest, it makes me understand things from beehaw’s perspective quite a bit, then.
Yeah, I’m sure it doesn’t feel great, but I didn’t get the sense that they were trying to personally attack everyone on the relevant servers, but more of a “we’re only four people, did not expect our instance to become a “default” community, and are completely underwater from a moderation perspective. We need to pull a rip cord to get this under control”
Wait did sh.itjust.works do anything? I thought the story was that beehaw.org cut them and lemmy.world off, but only for people browsing on beehaw.
No Beehaw did not like how Sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world are run, did a complant session about how their mod tools are not talored to give them an excise of power on users not based in their instance, and then cut them off saying “they are willing to negotiate reopening.” Personaly I see this like union bargoning, we are stronger all sticking together and not bending to beehaws wims
Make an account in another instance, there are lots of them.
When other instances have abstract requirements and a manual approval process that takes who-knows-how-long, though, that’s not always such an easy ask. People want to be where other people are, and those busier instances are the ones that set harder requirements.
When I left Reddit, I signed up on two instances: lemmy.ml and beehaw. I was eventually approved for lemmy.ml, but even now trying to access beehaw just hangs on the login page perpetually, presumably because I have not been approved and there’s nothing else I can do on my end.
Ironic that “accounts will be portable - if you don’t like the behaviour, practices, or community of one instance, you can take your data and leave” was touted as the big selling point of the Fediverse.
On more mature projects this is indeed the case. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago and is very much still in beta. We’ll get there eventually and it is already in the dev queue, but keep in mind that there are only two people working on the entire codebase full time. Don’t expect a Reddit level of fit and finish, but at the same time you also need not expect a Reddit level of corporate, shareholder-over-user antics.
Finally, since Lemmy is open source, if you really need a feature right now, you can always submit a pull request!
We’ll get there eventually
Get where? You appear to be responding from a technical perspective to a complaint about process. The complaint isn’t (primarily) that it is technically hard to migrate data, but that moderators themselves are putting deliberate barriers in the way of migration. It doesn’t matter how fast your car is if there are roadblocks every five meters.
The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.
I am not 100% sure where you are going with this, however I am going to say I agree that the move by beehaw is a blatent move to exert control on other instances, and it was never in question, in my mind atleast that it was their goal from my reading of their first post. I however disagree that they pose a threat to the other istances, they pose a threat if instances give in, like it apears sh.itjust.works may have done given their new post. Beehaw, sense the begining has been going arround acting like they have quite a bit like they are the arbitor, and everyone else should join them. I for one think the other instances of Lemmy should band together and let Beehaw wall themselves off. I do not think they would sucseed in this goal, and they would either give up on their imperialistic conquest or they would die a death of isolation.
it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn’t aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.
I am not sure I have seen, in my time watching beehaw block first justify later, a mass transfer to beehaw before, but I uderstand the potential threat now.
Stg beehaw’s admins need to grow a pair
Eh, it’s not all bad. They want a certain tenor to their instance, and don’t have the tools to effectively deal with folks who want to screw with that. Lemmy is in a period of exponential growth, and open registration policies seem to be the exception rather than the norm.
If it’s an actual problem (I haven’t seen anything particularly problematic yet, but I’m your average good natured sh.it.head), they’re within their rights to use the few tools at their disposal to calm things down, work with the instances of concern, and retool their approach.
This is all a learning experience for everyone involved. I have no ill-will or butthurt over this move, just disappointment that we can’t have nice things right away.
