What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
The problem is mainly that open registration allows quick ban evasion, making it very hard to remove bad actors that are using instances with open registration (without admin approval).
But admin approval just slows it down right? Like how is the admin going to know you aren’t a bad actor?
It also really slows down the sign-up process which will cripple the growth of the Fediverse.
Yeah, it’s a pity, this is the worst time for defederation, when the userbase is seeing a boom in growth.
Yeah, it seems some are happy to burn down the whole thing if it means they can rule over the ashes.
That’s not what’s happening at all. They have site rules. Remotr users aren’t following them, and aren’t beholden to them. Why should they continue to federated with instances that have incompatible rules?
That’s not “burn[ing] the whole thing down”. That’s community management.
The other side of federation is that instances are communities in their own right. And you don’t get to show up in someone else’s yard, shit in their pool, and then expect to be invited back.
But they can ban those users, exactly the same as they ban users on their own instance.
Not if they can’t keep up with them. And if the trolls and bad actors are mostly coming from the same 2 or 3 places, why wouldn’t you just block those 2 or 3 places?
You can step on each individual ant that walks through your door, or you can get better door seals.
No, they can’t, that’s the point. On their own instance, there’s an approval process for new users, and so it’s much harder and slower for a banned user to come back with a different account. On the two instances they defederated from, new user registration is instant and automatic, so if you ban one of those users, they can be back in seconds on another account.
It’s their own prerogative, but considering their “restrictive” registration process with that application box, I’m not sure Beehaw will grow much in the future.
My guess is they’re 100% fine with slow growth. Apparently they’re looking for a specific kind of community, and they’d much rather have a small one of the right sort than a large one of the wrong sort.
It slows it down sufficiently that both sides can deal with it.
I don’t think normal approval of accounts slows down the growth of the fediverse. No single instance alone can manage thousands of users signing up the same time anyways, so admin approval also helps balancing the load by making impatient people sign up somewhere else that is not overloaded with applications.