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
I’m already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
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.
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.
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.
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.
A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.
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.
Admins are users too from a developer’s point of view.
No, they’re not. They’re admins.
I develop software for a living. If someone is using my software in any capacity, they are a user from my point of view, even if they have admin privileges.
Oh wow congrats, like half the world writes software, I also write software for a living, but I don’t confuse the admins running my software and using my admin portals with the primary users of my software who will determine whether or not it will be popular or a success.
Back up and examine the context of the conversation and then stop with this pointless semantic distinction. In the context of whether or not your social network software will be successful, an admin setting that allows one instance to connect to other is not a user facing feature.
People do not open Reddit to examine how the Reddit admins configured their kubernetes clusters, so stop with this dumb bullshit pretending like users care about federation. They want somewhere to come have a discussion with everyone else interested in the same thing. That’s it.
This is my read on the situation, but my view is different - if BeeHaw want to have what is functionally just a private Reddit-like forum, let them. But we should stop acting like BeeHaw is a part of the Fediverse with the same goals as Lemmy-at-large.
Of course, lemmygrad.ml is my home instance and I’m pretty sure BeeHaw has never federated with us so I’m not really missing anything.
Most of the complaints seem to come from people who assumed BeeHaw was just like any other Lemmy instance and have sort of made it, or a community on it, their home; or tried to join and almost bounced off Lemmy because they assumed BeeHaw was just what Lemmy was like.
I think the best move going forward would be to either de-list BeeHaw from Lemmy directories or make sure it is properly signposted what kind of server it is. I think this will all naturally become less of an issue once big, generic instances like Lemmy.world blow up and become the defaults, and traffic to BeeHaw slows down.
User experience is not the primary motivator for the development of the Fediverse. The features you dislike are the core features of the Fediverse and are the main reasons it exists.
Software exist to solve a user’s problem. All software’s primary motivator should be user experience.
It’s quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user’s don’t want to use (see: Reddit’s official app / new site).
Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.
It may be the point, but it makes the UX terrible. Lemmy is really struggling from a UX perspective, enough to make me question if it’s worth sticking with.
The new user experience is pretty terrible because 90%+ have no interest in trying to figure of “federation”, they just want shit that works.