Hey kbinMeta.
Given the news that beehaw.org are defederating from two of the largest Lemmy instances due to issues with moderation, I thought it may be worth @ernest considering closing registrations here, for a while at least.
I’ve seen that a handful of other kbin instances have been spun up, however, kbin.social currently dwarfs their user numbers. kbin.social is currently sat at over 28,000 registered users, with the next highest, fedia.io sitting at around 3,000 users. I may be incorrect on this, but as far as I’m currently aware, @ernest is the only admin, I believe he may have mentioned that he’s taken a couple of additional trusted users on board, but at this time, I can’t find receipts to back that up, however, I am aware of the immense pressure that @ernest is in to keep things not only running smoothly, but also moving forward.
The workload overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t read all your messages.
This is in relation to account deletion requests alone, and understandably, this explosion in popularity and userbase was not only unexpected for @ernest, but possibly also for the platform itself:
Apparently fedia.io have already disabled open resgistrations due to usercount, (although that may be unverified, as this post from the fedia.io admin doesn’t suggest that, but still food for thought.). [This is not the case, they just aren’t federating, as confirmed by Jerry, thanks! I think Jerry’s comment is still very relevant to the topic at hand, however.]
Now, I’ve already seen a handful of comments denigrating beehaw.org from some of the defederated site users, as well as users local to kbin.social whose accounts were made after the defederation. This is more than likely to result in kbin.social also being defederated from beehaw.org, if not others. I completely understand that this is the nature of the fediverse, and that no one instance is going to be completely open with every other instance, however, I think it’s worth considering that we “have our own house in order”, namely in the shape of more site-wide moderation, instead of keeping the floodgates open for every reddit refugee or otherwise.
I’m well aware that many may disagree with this, but I think it’s something to consider.
Edit: Edited title of post. I just want to clarify, I don’t mean close registrations for good, just while things calm down a little bit / ernest has chance to get a solid moderation / admin team in place.
It entirely depends on the ethos and direction ernest wants to take this instance. Personally I’m fond of the “open signups, federate with everyone” approach that kbin currently has. If people do not wish to federate with everyone, they can go join another instance that defederates itself from the ones they don’t like?
In terms of culture, I do think things will inevitably shift and change as kbin grows. that’s an unavoidable part of growing a community. Though I do think having clear guidestones and ethos will help direct people’s default assumptions about the platform.
Keep in mind that defederation is a strong action and one that has huge impact. It’s not something that results from just a small amount of trouble makers, but as the general larger community as a whole. Beehaw defederated from lemmyworld because they do not like the culture/behavior that lemmyworld users have. lemmyworld can’t really resolve this without really changing what they’re about. at which point I think a lot of their users would end up leaving.
It’s naturally the case that some people will have “clashes” with other people, culturally speaking. you can either try to change yourself, you can block the people you don’t like, or you can try to tolerate and accept both clashing cultures with a “agree to disagree” mentality.
beehaw took the stance of blocking. they didn’t want to yield to lemmyworld’s culture and userbase, nor did they wish to tolerate and accept lemmyworld users in their communities.
kbinauts I think have been pretty good at doing that last option: accepting and tolerating those of different cultures and beliefs and agreeing to disagree. However, that mindset is utterly at odds with the way beehaw does things. In that a regard, I do think some instances may end up blocking kbin simply over philosophy of moderation. But we’ll have to see.
From my kbinaut eyes, lemmyworld users are not problematic. sh.itjust.works users are not problematic. I have no issues with those guys. beehaw does. I don’t think I’ll ever come around to beehaw’s way of doing things either, which is why I don’t join that site. If kbin starts taking a similar approach to beehaw, I might just end up leaving kbin for another instance.
Troublemakers who spam are indeed sometimes a problem. but unless you get to the point of the culture being on the level of 4chan, personally I don’t see a need to defederate.
I think beehaw kinda set themselves up for mass defederation, due to only having 4 mods for the entire site, which is simply not able to tolerate growth that the rest of the fediverse will see.