Bee-who?
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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I can't give feedback without specifics on what exactly you feel the downsides are of federating.
I will say this: in my six months on kbin and Lemmy, I have seen more assumption of good faith in interactions, and I do believe Beehaw's users has been a significant part of that. It would be a negative for the Fediverse if Beehaw defederated. That said, the users are of course under no obligation to provide the emotional labor to make those kinds of efforts.
If the reason is because your mods are saying they can't handle the workload, I get it. I think that's a 100% valid reason for defederating, whether or not it's temporary as Lemmy's moderation support matures. It's already a challenging assignment, even without a stricter ethos like Beehaw's in place. In general, there are a lot of new mods across Lemmy, and it's a significant vulnerability, in my opinion. The next big surge of users, whether from Reddit imploding again or something else like a major publication's story on Lemmy going viral, won't be about creating more buckets for users like it was this past summer. It will stress the buckets themselves, and some of the mods holding those communities together won't be ready for it.
I have broadly enjoyed interacting with content and users from beehaw, but have also had friction with their moderation style at times. However that is is the point of the fediverse, my home account is not on beehaw, I donβt have to agree, I just have to play nice in the occasional thread.
Overall the federation adds content,variety, and texture to the fediverse and itβd be a shame to lose it
I've always felt being on the fediverse was antithetical to Beehaw's mission. It wants to bee a kind, safe place for disenfranchised users, but it feels like less of a tight knit community when it is federated.
The best example I can think of is like a high-school club/group. Being on the fediverse is like your group claiming a table in a crowded lunch room. Yes you've got your group together where you can talk amongst yourselves, but everything you say can be heard by everyone else in the room and likewise their conversations are going to butt in whether you like it or not. An unfederated or semi-private forum is more like getting an unused classroom for your group to meet in. It's still open for anyone to join as long as they don't create trouble, but having your own room makes the conversation feel more personal/intimate and people are more likely to open up about personal stuff they wouldn't want to yell out in the lunch room.
Probably a poor analogy, and I may be misunderstanding their goal, but that's my 2 cents.
I'm not a beehaw user, so personally I won't care. If I had joined beehaw in order to get to a federated platform, turning it into a walled garden would be disappointing to say the least. I'd leave, of course.
In general, it would be a shame to lose the content and connections that there might have been.
I agree that if your goal is to be centralized, heavily control what your users see, and only your team is capable of doing such a thing, then federation is not the solution.
However, as someone on the outside looking in, I doubt you would have the user base you do, or maintain it for very long if it were just an old-style centralized forum. It seems to me that those forums were simply not preferable to the level of content and connectivity offered by the myspaces, facebooks, diggs, and reddits of the world.
If you're open to maintain interaction with other servers, and just find moderation too resource intensive, then I think you're probably just bigger than you can afford right now, and should shoot for fewer DAUs.
The number of people out there who want a safe space for the disenfranchised can't just be your moderation team, and that's why the fediverse exists. Amortize that responsibility over multiple instances, don't feel like it's something that only you are able to solve.
Who gives a fuck what others think, they have the power to block communities/instances if they want. No need to make that choice for them. I like the content, and if I didn't then it's as simple as just blocking the domain. That's the nice thing about the fedi.
Don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass on the way out.