This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    8·
    1 year ago

    Having accounts on both instances, I can say the “cultural” difference is the moderation style, and user expectations:

    • Lemmy World: Reddit-like rules, a huge influx of Reddit refugees who think every comment has to go against the parent one, free registration which makes it easy to create an account and go troll mode on federated instances.
    • Beehaw: Very open-ended but at the same time strict “be nice” moderation with minimal rules, users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.
    • Lemmygrad, Hexbear, Exploding heads, etc: I think the cultural differences are obvious there.
    • Other instances: they have much smaller user bases than Lemmy World, so even when there are cultural differences (dbzer0, lemm.ee, etc), they are not overwhelming (yet) the mod team on Beehaw.

    we look for new moderators when we notice communities are un-moderated

    The problem is not just having moderators on LW, but moderating LW’s userbase on federated instances. Some number of LW’s users seem to be hostile towards Beehaw, and there is little LW can do about that other than banning their accounts, which I don’t think would be that much better for anyone.

    • BuxtonWater@beehaw.orgEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.

      Didn’t have to be an essay, it just had to be something that answered the 3 questions it asked about why you want to join beehaw.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
        7·
        1 year ago

        Precisely. I think the “write an essay” has become kind of a meme among non-Beeple about Beehaw at this point; I first saw it on Reddit a couple months ago, kept seeing it on and off, and just today saw it again.

        It was also in part what made me join: when I saw what it was all about, I was like “so… people who believe that thinking before answering is too much effort, won’t be here… nice…” 😄

      • acastcandream@beehaw.org
        6·
        1 year ago

        The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway. Either it’s too much to ask of them to write a couple of sentences, or they haven’t even bothered to look and inform themselves before spitting their hot take. Neither personality is desirable lol

        • BitOneZero@beehaw.org
          4·
          1 year ago

          The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway.

          The TLDR behavior and won’t click offsite links and references and want a constant stream of tiny little ideas. There was a time when Reddit wasn’t like that and it became the culture of TLDR and downvote-disagree.

          Reddit could have single-handedly taken on clickbait in 2014 or earlier by people replacing news headlines with sincere earnest descriptions. But the clickbait became what people swam in.

      • averyminya@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        My friend put some pretty simple stuff and got denied. Granted it may have been during a negative influx