Beehaw.org has announced they will be defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
Beehaw.org has announced they will be defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I've been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.
This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?
Thoughts?
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From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can't see this being a good decision for Bee's long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn't enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there's nothing to scroll people won't stay. The only reason I'm here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.
I agree. The all new feed with federation is the only thing that has enough content for me as well. I could see users moving away from all the involved servers or maybe just beehaw. There are still a lot of instances that link with beehaw, lemmy.world and shitjustworks so you can see everything.
Worth noting though that if this causes a migration away from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works it'll just lead to another instance growing to the size that beehaw.org seems ready to defederate from. It seems their primary issue is those instances not requiring any kind of moderation for signups and I would argue that's one of the factors that creates larger instances.
It almost certainly is, since it's a lot easier to create an account if you don't have to justify why you want the account made, and you also don't have to wait several hours for the moderators to approve your account.
You can just click a few times and go.
I mean, "long term growth" isn't desirable. Growth isn't sustainable. If they have a critical mass of community, then there is nothing that says they need to grow until they destroy themselves.
Long term growth is necessary to keep any online community alive. Not necessarily accelerating growth. But if a community has less members coming in than the ones who leave over time it will eventually die, no matter what platform it's on.
Replacing membership wouldn't be growth. Failing to replace membership would be negative growth.
Edit: Suffice to say that insufficient growth is NOT a problem any major instance is dealing with right now, and the reasons given for defederation are potentially transient situations
Growth doesn't nessisarily mean your userbase is growing. It can also mean replacing users lost to attrition.