Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance’s policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It’s evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
I think flexible federation is likely a good thing, and means we can have separate meta-communities with different basic attitudes, so people can be in the kind of spaces they want. My first experience of the fediverse was mastodon, and while the format wasn’t really my thing, I loved the amount of individual control it gave users over what they could see.
I wonder if there could be some kind of system to make this simpler, chunkier and less-drama, though.
What if there were:
- different individual policies that instances could subscribe to
- coalitions based on adoption of specific policy bundles, and allow-lists based on them.
- coalition-curated deny-lists of non-compliant instances.
A little bit Schengen area, a little bit NATO.
Ferinstance I can see some instances only wanting to talk to others with curated signup, curated community-creation, no-NSFW, specific political leanings etc - and I can see some instances not wanting those things. Some people may want very safe spaces, others may want in-your-face free speech. Both are reasonable (imho), and there’s no reason both sides can’t have what they want, without it having to be a big deal.
Possibly this could be layered, I haven’t worked out the mechanics yet - but even if you have groups around rules ABCDE, AB, ACE, BCD, etc - it would still help set and stabilise people’s expectations, and help them reach consensus, preferably with a bigger granularity than single servers - and reduce the number of nasty surprises down the track.
I don’t like the idea of coalitions at all. To me it feels like the coalitions would become very “us vs them”, i.e. you must defederate all instances that allow any topic in this list or we will defederate you. It leaves no neutral ground, creates echo chambers, and deepens the political divide that plagues our society.
IMO it’s better if
- Lemmy allows individual users to block all communities from an instance or all users from an instance, sort of like defederation but per-user.
- Instances have the rule that “when you interact with other instances/communities, you must follow all their rules, or we will suspend your cross-instance posting rights for X days”.
Then instances can act like neutral infrastructure/identity providers and each user can decide exactly how they want to interact with the fediverse without causing fragmentation.
