Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
History of LW controversial decisions
- when they promoted Discord as an official communication channel (https://lemmy.world/post/3478399 - since then they created a Matrix chat)
- when they blocked the piracy communities (https://lemmy.world/post/13320356 )
- when they announced they might move from Lemmy to Sublinks (some comments from LW admins were quite controversial: https://lemmy.world/post/13899357 )
- when they forced the media bias fact checker bot and discarded user feedback (https://lemmy.world/post/18775630 - to be fair, they since then removed it from [email protected] , it’s still in [email protected] )
- when they realized centralization of communities on LW was impacting the ability of other instances to stay up to date (https://lemmy.world/post/13967373 )
- when they updated their rules following a power trip overtake of a community (https://feddit.org/post/2308651 )
Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).
IDK what the answer is
Hello, good to see you here!
I completely get what you mean. Beehaw creates its own kind of situation. For a long time I was hoping they would refederate with SJW and LW, especially after 0.19.X where users could block instances on their own, but I guess that’s never going to happen.
It’s really a shame, because people and communities on Beehaw are really valuable
Heyo! Hello to you.
I mean, I get it. I saw the announcement that bad-faith posts from lemmy.world were creating so much moderation load that it was simply impossible for them to federate with LW and have the kind of community they wanted to have. And I thought, well that’s kind of surprising to me, IDK what that’s about. And then I started participating more heavily on lemmy.world and then I thought, oooooohh, that’s what they were talking about. It all makes sense now.
I see where they come from. Hopefully Sublinks will have better moderation tools, and potentially allow them to refederate.
In the meantime, we are kind of stuck in the middle.
Is sublinks what they’re switching to? I was curious about that. I’m not real aware of a good substitute for Lemmy / kbin / mbin as of right now; it doesn’t seem like there’s a fully perfect solution available.
Beehaw is at least considering it. They’ll probably poll their community once Sublinks is released, but if the mod tools are better there and the features are the same, I don’t see why they wouldn’t switch
I thought they had posted that they’d already made the decision of what platform to switch to, but weren’t announcing it yet (which seemed weird to me). Sublinks honestly would make some sense given the Lemmy-compatibility and emphasis on mod tools, which I know was a constant pain point for them… but IDK if it’s mature enough. But yeah if you told me they were waiting for it to mature so they could switch over, that would make sense.
I’m also very curious to see how (if at all) you migrate an existing server with all its existing ActivityPub keys and subscriptions to a new piece of software, on the same domain, without unfixably breaking its federation with every other instance. My guess is that they will switch to a different beehaw.(whatever) domain but I’m curious if there’s a good solution I’m not aware of.
Tha’ts probably how it’s going to happen.
If the software you’re migrating to is built to allow that to happen, it’s absolutely possible. In the microblogging side of the fedi migrating between software isn’t uncommon, though in nearly all cases they’re forks from the same “family tree” so things work out mostly due to that, (Misskey is infamous for having a LOT of forks with most being capable of migrating to most, Mastodon can migrate to/from it’s forks Glitch-soc/Chuckya/Hometown, and Pleroma and Akkoma can migrate between each other…).
There are software being built from-scratch to be migratable from other software (aside from Sublinks, Iceshrimp.NET comes to mind as a total rewrite of Iceshrimp, which started out as a fork of Firefish and therefore is in the Misskey family tree, but found the existing codebase to be un-salvagable) but it’s definitely a rare case.
Seems like at some point they wanted a fork for every letter of the alphabet ha ha
Why not post to both with Lemmy’s cross-post feature?
To be fair, I cross post a lot, but over time I gets a bit annoying, especially when you know that today with user-level federation maybe Beehaw could consider refederating with LW and SJW
Beehaw has given up on Lemmy (Or just given up in general? They aren’t taking care of what they have nor have they moved to something new).
They’re still on v0.18.4 despite v0.18.5 being an extremely easy and safe update with a hotfix for an issue they were specifically complaining about. Literally takes like a couple minutes to do that update but they never did it. They’re also keeping themselves open to at least 1 security issue by being on such an old version.