I’m just curious if it is on the table at some point. I only see a small slice of beehaw when I’m logged in but the active participation feels like it is on a downward trend. Like, there appears to be ~700 on here right now. I know numbers aren’t everything, but overall engagement is important. I’m on several instances with different accounts. I’ve been gravitating towards my .world account because it is so active. I get a grouchy or rude reply still from time to time, but it seems like most of the trolls have gone or been removed. That instance seems to be maturing fast and growing some personality all its own. The server seems constantly stressed, but Ruud is holding it together. The moderation seems much more in check now too. That’s just my perspective. I’d like to see everyone come together again, but I am just one user.
The open signups is the sticking point. Even at the point of de-federation, Lemmy.world was a respectable community and still is today (even if it’s shitpost city for beans atm)
The admins here aim to curate an explicitly friendly space to chat, and they intend to achieve that through extensive manual review. They’ve also posted an article about how if you let even a small amount of toxicity through, you quickly lose your nicest and friendliest members of the community.
I think what they are waiting on is A) a more granular ability to allowlist or blocklist communities on specific servers, B) enforce a manually reviewed application for users on other instances to post on Beehaw, C) Allow only one-way posting but two-way reading.
See this comment and see Lemmy isues #3255 and #3275
You’re expressing one of the most frequent frustrations people bring up with the federated model.
To my mind, it’s a matter of individual user expectations. There are a lot of people for whom centralized social media became “the internet,” and the idea that websites were ever intended for anything but passive external linking to individual pages is foreign. This is not a universally shared starting point.
I have a .world account for my local community and, at this point, all non-Beehaw fediverse stuff. I’m still on a few message-board sites for niche topics that Reddit’s generalization made difficult to get useful information about among the detritus.
Beehaw and .world serve different needs, so I view having multiple Lemmy accounts as being as reasonable as having a different login for my natural gas company than my electricity supplier.
I think federation is overrated. How difficult is it to have multiple accounts these days?
It will be very hard to vet users from other instances properly in the Fediverse. Even if tools exist to do better validation (like, for instance, allowing an instance to validate that the subscriber from another instance has a valid email address), someone with ill intent can figure out a way around that.
I think that the Fediverse could use an identity verification service, but fear that’s what Facebook is trying to be.
Having multiple accounts isn’t the issue IMO. It’s communication about centralization / decentralization. There is confusing and mixed messaging about the difference between “Lemmy” and “Beehaw.” Just like there is between “Mastodon” and “mastodon.socal.”
Joe public’s perception of participation in social networks is based on brand: “See my post on Facebook,” “reply to my tweet,” “did you see that subreddit?”
It needs to be clearer that’s not how things work here. There are things you gain from decentralization, but also things you lose. People will always want the best of both worlds.
I’ve got a Beehaw account and one on Blahaj to see the defederated instances. I’m finding the interactions on Beehaw communities much more engaging than in other places. And I’m enjoying the fact the Lemmy allows the customization of your experience. So Beehaw can choose to federate with what they want. And other servers can do the same.
I don’t have any issues with having a few accounts. I’ve got more than one email account for different purposes (spam, banking, job applications and personal), and it’s not difficult to maintain accounts on different Lemmy servers. There’s nothing stopping you from making an account on every server.
I’m just one person too, whose opinion isn’t important. I don’t endlessly scrolling all day, so I’m not “running out” of new content. What I have noticed: There’s a noticeable quality improvement within Beehaw. And I appreciate that. So I personally don’t have a strong preference on what the admins/mods do about refederating.
Wefwef’s multi account feature has been incredible. We don’t have “Multi”’s yet / alternative subscription feeds, but there’s nothing stopping me from just spinning up a new acct for specific… interests.
I have also noticed the quality of beehaw - writing why you want an account / checking your email is such a small barrier to entry, and yet it has such an impact.
There is a very fine balance of ease of access / community size / community quality, and I think beehaw is there. I feel like I could get to know people / usernames here, which would never happen on r-dit.
I totally agree about the barrier to entry. It wasn’t hard to write my little application, and I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t already looked through and decided that the content seemed high enough quality to make it worth 3 minutes of my life. But it will help keep the quality high which is the attraction for me. I can jump to another instance and look at beans, and I can jump over here and not look at beans. It’s all good to me right now. It would make more sense to refederate if they could block specific communities…like the ones that are full of beans :D
The mods have stated a few times that it’s just a matter of having the right tools to better handle to influx in trolls that the instances bring in. The admins and mods are in communication with the other instances working on a solution.
As a whole even when we were still federated the majority of the shit.justworks and .world instances were fine. A little more typically abrasive internet guy but the majority of users are just people. The problem was due to their open registration process that a disproportionate amount of moderated and banned users came from these instances and with the current explosion in users and everything else on their plate the mods had to do what they had to do.
Refederation will happen eventually though.
I think that begging the mods for refederation will be a common occurrence in the newly emerging fediverse, but I think we’ll all just have to get used to the idea that the fediverse is about voluntary communities and you’ll have to forge your own path using multiple accounts/etc. The entire point of defederation is that Beehaw doesn’t want certain communities or people with certain viewpoints congregating here - that’s the choice of this community and the use of multiple accounts does get around that but it’s just what will have to be done if you want to be someone associated with defederated communities.
I think we’ll all just have to get used to the idea that the fediverse is about voluntary communities
So many people have only ever known the Internet and web as a handful of centralized walled gardens that have a financial interest in keeping you locked in and scrolling. So when you have a system that is explicitly built in a federated manner, explicitly built to give communities the ability to choose who and how they interact with others, and you don’t have algorithmically generated content, those people are just lost.
To be clear, Beehaw has said that they’d refederate with lemmy.world once better mod tools exist. I don’t believe they have any particular problem with the instance beyond the fact that it was too big and too open to control the inevitable trolls and bot accounts that come with it.
