There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 32 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

unless we're compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

we're not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us--we've been quite public that we'd be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that's what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way--and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you'd like.

[–] millie@beehaw.org 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

If I remember correctly, I definitely voted with the majority on this one, for what it's worth.

I don't agree with every moderator decision that's been made, but there isn't a site on the planet where I'm going to agree with every moderator decision, even if I'm running the damn thing. I do strongly agree though that bigger isn't better, and that 'that other one is bigger' isn't a compelling argument for re-federating.

I chime in with criticism often enough, so I figured I'd just poke my head in and say I think y'all are right on target with this one.

[–] qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee 5 points 6 months ago

You should do what your users want. Growth in users for the sake of "line goes up" is a faulty attitude. Dozens of users sounds like a community of good faith users, very nice. You do you!

[–] imaqtpie@lemmy.myserv.one 5 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the response. I didn't realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that's good to hear. I'm familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.

I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don't mean to say you're responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it's helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.

For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don't have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.

However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.