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

    • masterspace@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      I’m already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:

      What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.

      A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)

      A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)

      Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.

      Having “multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it” is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.

      A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.

      Federation is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.

      • zalack@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!

        Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!

        To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don’t have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.

        Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.

        It’s still those four people’s server though, and it’s totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren’t entitled to it’s content, and users don’t have to stick around if they don’t like the way it’s being run.

        The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there will be some servers whose choices you don’t agree with.

        • masterspace@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          I’m sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

          The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

          Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it’s an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they’re built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don’t provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.

          • zalack@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            If that were true, then the software wouldn’t have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel. You could write software in a way where defederating from a specific instance is hard to do.

            IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what “the point” of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.

            • masterspace@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              If that were true, then the software wouldn’t have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel.

              A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.

              IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what “the point” of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.

              In broad strokes yes, but in more specific and relevant strokes, the point of social networking software is for users to use it to engage with each other, not concern themselves with how it’s servers are administrated.