but things should normalize after that.

There’s a greater likelihood that the content creators are the ones moving. Most of the reddit power users likely used third party apps. Most of the reddit power users are also the ones who wrote most of the comments worth reading.

So if on june 1 most of the reddit power users flee, reddit’s enshitification will have reached a terminal stage. Eventually, reddit will stop having things worth reading, and the lurkers will all move over.

I think we’re in for a long decline of reddit a la facebook. However unlike facebook, there isn’t a market of old people/foreign markets that can fill their user numbers.

That’s not how any of this works…

Communities (as you put, sublemmy) can’t be individually federated, only instances can be. And needing another account is a sign that you are looking at a post on the wrong instance, not a sign that an instance is not federated. In fact, finding out an instance is not federated can be pretty difficult unless you check the list of instances that are defederated on another instance.

That’s not a universal link, so you ended up on a different instance. A much simpler and easy explanation than what you came up with.

My NFL team last year gave up its franchise quarterback, and the subreddit basically only talked about the former QB for the entire preseason, and then still talked about it for half the season. Then it died down. And before the protest, he wasn’t really talked about all that much.

Reddit is still fresh in people’s minds. It will go away. In the early days of reddit a LOT of people talked about digg, but within a few months it just wasn’t mentioned much anymore.

A lot of people here spent years on our ex-platform. It’s going to take some time to get that out of our system. In the meantime, enjoy the shadenfreude!

I was a mod on an advice sub on reddit, this is a terrible idea.

It was enough work as a mod to sift through things that actually needed to be reported. For advice, downvotes are needed to express when something is genuinely bad advice. It can’t be up to mods to sift through every single comment, that’d be impossible.

Just fyi, when posting links to communities, you should just use the “/c/” without the link to the instance. Like this: /c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml

This is similar to how those links were done on reddit (/r/). The problem with your link is that it is instance specific, which is really helpful for anyone in your instance, but anyone in a different instance will be thrown out of their instance if they click it (they’ll be unable to subscribe).

I explained this in my post: https://lemmy.world/post/149743

Those communities still exist on this instance, they just aren’t synced. You can see new posts from only lemmy.world users. Any posts/comments you make are not shared within the wider lemmyverse.

Effectively that community is a zombie community on this instance. Just unsub from that community, it’s useless to you unless behave decides to refederate.

Yes.

Just explaining how this affects the users here, that’s it. I just said why I personally think this is a mistake.

surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

So there are whitelist only instances (which honestly is what beehaw should be doing), so if you hosted your own instance, you would need to be whitelisted in order to interact with beehaw communities/users. Otherwise, federation is pretty much a default

Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

Ok, so this requires some understanding of the ActivityPub protocol, and my understand of this edge case is admittedly a bit fuzzy. You can still access that information, you could do it right now just by going to https://beehaw.org, and if you have some mechanism to pull that data, you could still get that data if you wanted to. But critically, that wouldn’t use ActivityPub.

With ActivityPub, your instance would send a request to the community on beehaw to follow the community. The beehaw instance would then send updates to your instance, where they would be stored as a copy. Beehaw keeps the “true” version, as the community is hosted on their instance, but you have your own copy. If beehaw defederates you (or is whitelist only and never federates you), then you can’t send that request (rather, you can send the request, but beehaw won’t listen). So beehaw will not send updates via ActivityPub.

You obviously got called out for disregarding the rules of other instances

I obviously didn’t. I like how you just assuming I’m some internet asshole. All I did was write out an explanation for the users of this instance because there was a lot of confusion about what defederation means. Maybe stop being a jerk and making assumptions?

I never said beehaw wasn’t allowed to do what they’re doing, of course they are. You’re the one making that assumption. I said that this will result in more damage to beehaw than to lemmy.world, and it will do more damage still to lemmy as a whole.

Like I told the other dude, I don’t care what beehaw does. I was just explaining the consequences of this action for the users on this instance. Why are you even here? You aren’t in this instance.

I think this action is bad for the adoption of lemmy, that’s why I don’t like it. Beyond that, the beehaw admins can do what they like. If they want to nuke their walled garden/prison, that’s their prerogative. I’m just saying what a bad idea I think it is.

Yeah I did. That’s why I think they don’t fully understand what defederation entails. It doesn’t accomplish the goals they set out in their decision post, and does have a whole bunch of knock on effects (for their own users) that they don’t address at all.

That’s not at all what’s happening though.

Anyone can create an instance. So using your example, it’s kind of like reddit banning anyone posting from 4chan, but literally anyone could create their own “chan” to post to reddit. If they only whitelisted instances then that would at least make some sense.

It shouldn’t be beehaw’s job to moderate another instance that just lets everyone in.

But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

I think the admins of Beehaw think they’ve effectively banned lemmy.world users from their instance, which is largely what they did. And if they chose to do that, then that’s their decision. But they didn’t choose to do that, they did something far more drastic.

Defederation prevents beehaw users from interacting with lemmy.world users ANYWHERE on lemmy. Effectively, beehaw admins are deciding what their users can see elsewhere on lemmy, which in my view is wrong. Effectively, in order to access most of lemmy, beehaw users will need a second account on another instance. And if you’re going to have a second account, why have the first?

The problem is that defederation is not an act of moderators. This is an admin level action being used in service of a moderator level problem. This is not how defederation is meant to be used, and given how the admins of that instance describe their reasoning, I don’t think they fully understand the implications of their decision.

1. There are other, less heavy handed ways of accomplishing the same thing

2. This action doesn’t actually do what they want it to do, since anyone can create a new instance and post,

3. This action does more to make the experience of their users worse

So yes, admins choosing to defederate another instance despite not understanding what that actually does and what the consequences of that action are is, as I said, dumb.

If that’s the point, then there’s nothing wrong with what they did.

But like someone else commented, why are they hosting a lemmy instance? What they want is a curated forum…

Yep. It’s almost like they didn’t fully understand what they were doing…

There’s a lot of instances that could defederate from. 2 is not a huge number so far.

They defederated from 300 some instances. And it’s kinda ridiculous to use the number of instances instead of the number of users. They defederated from 2 of the top 4 instances in terms of number of users.

It’s definitely a temporary, broad axe to cutting an apple type solution to their troll problem

Two things:

1. It doesn’t actually address their troll problem, since anyone can create a new instance and post to their communities.

2. It has the knock on affect of their users not being able to interact with a huge chunk of the wider fediverse

That second point is the main criticism I have for them. I don’t think they fully understood the consequences of their actions. They’re using an extreme admin-level action for community moderation. That’s now how this was intended to be used.

Why would anyone stay on an instance that can’t interact with a huge chunk of the fediverse? Only the most passionate beehaw-ers will stay there. Most will likely leave to more accessible pastures.

They’re trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users.

Sure, but the way they went about doing it was the wrong way to do it.

They’ve effectively locked their users into ONLY accessing their walled garden.

I think what they wanted to do was block lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users from posting in their communities, which would be possible with a pretty simple bot. Instead, they’re largely preventing their own users from accessing other communities, which based on their post was not their intention. And because of those effects, it’s likely going to result in their users leaving for instances with more access.

walled garden

More like a prision

They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers

They could do that by blocking all users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. What they’ve done is prevent their users from interacting with the broader fediverse, which is not at all what they intended to do based on their post.